


route 93

by beverlymarshian



Series: route 93 [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bottom Richie Tozier, M/M, Roadtrip, Shower Sex, Strangers to Lovers, eddie kaspbrak can smoke a little as a treat, feel good, maybe you dont believe in soulmates, summer loving, until you meet someone on a long stretch of highway under the heavy summer sun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:35:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24570898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beverlymarshian/pseuds/beverlymarshian
Summary: The drive from Vegas to Phoenix is not long enough, not to fall in love with a stranger. It comes close.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Series: route 93 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1932856
Comments: 80
Kudos: 507





	route 93

**Author's Note:**

> There is a playlist for this fic [HERE](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/22bdV3UTVP2kuek9vsRkzr?si=W8uhjYsgTiSCQY2s-QhmJw) on spotify, the same playlist featured in the fic, and I couldn't have written thisthing or really any without @toesures (on Twitter) taking my fragments of ideas and weaving them into perfect playlists.
> 
> CWs: alcohol, smoking (cigarettes and weed), alcohol, divorce, dangerous driving, brief references to homophobia & real-life homophobic violence, references past emotional abuse and trauma. This is a very light fic, for the most part, but just flagging some small mentions.

The car stutters to a halt, smoke billowing from its hood, an acrid plasticity filling the cabin. Richie spares the quickest glance in the side mirror before throwing the driver side door open, feet twisting in the too-small space as he tumbles out of the car. He lands palm-first on the road. The bloody scrapes would surely hurt if the asphalt was not searing, a hand on a hot element. Cursing, Richie folds his body into a roll, shoulder first, as he spills onto the road.

Tears prick his eyes, from the smoke, the burns, the blood, the _hubris_ of thinking he could drive his car for the whole fucking tour. Stan’s voice rings in his ears, stern, worried, _Richie you’re a celebrity. Either fly or buy a new car_. Richie did neither.

A piercing, high-pitched honk cuts through the air. The only car in sight passes, uncaring, as Richie sits on the ground outside his car door, heat of the road burning through his shorts. He keeps his knees pulled up to his chest so his skin doesn’t blister off but does not move to stand.

With the engine off, the plumes of ashy smoke begin to dissipate, eeking out from under the chipped and peeling red hood of his Echo. Richie stays on the road until the air is clear again, until it looks like he pulled over to the side of the road of his own volition. The air around him is still pungent, singeing his nostrils, burning wires an assault on his senses.

“Really Holly? Ten years and you couldn’t get me to a rest stop?” Holly remains still, the only sound a soft _tickticktick_ as the engine cools.

Richie hobbles to his feet, finally sparing a look at his hands. Torn, bloodied, skin bright pink under the cuts. He shrugs off his button-up—cerulean, smattered with palm trees and flamingos, hanging over top of a faded band tee—and squeezes it in both hands, grimacing as the fabric makes contact with the tender, shredded skin. He uses his bare elbow to slam the driver’s door, skin burning briefly where it meets the hot metal of the car.

Keeping the hand wrapped in his shirt, Richie fishes his phone out of his pocket long enough to text Stan _made it to the last day of tour before breaking down! wish I had made it to Phoenix_. He drops the phone back into his pocket, not wanting to see Stan’s reply.

The car that honked as it passed had disappeared along the long, winding stretch of Route 93 ahead of him, and the long winding stretch behind him could be its mirror. An hour out of Vegas city limits, twenty minutes over state lines, and still more than three hours to the venue. 

There’s no point in popping the hood. He wouldn’t even know where to begin. He can barely change his wiper fluid, let alone spot a problem with the engine or whatever other components hide beneath the hood of a car. It’s a tow truck or a taxi—both, most likely. One to take his car somewhere and the other to get him to the venue.

Richie rounds the car to lean against the trunk, not enough space to sit but a fine place to lean, even as the sun-scorched metal burns his skin through his shorts. He should have left earlier. He knows this. Holly took him this far—first Seattle, then a slow meander down the coast, cutting across the great Nevada wasteland, Reno, Vegas, only to be defeated after an easy roll over state lines.

“You could have given me a sign,” he says, although she did: the grating screech from under the hood on ignition, the lower-pitched screech when he took a corner too fast. He had no intentions of stopping on the highway, nor were there any corners to take too quickly, just long, easing curves of the highway and the roll as he pushed her to 80 miles an hour. 

It was only a matter of time. He wishes it was not _this_ time, five hours from a show, in the middle of a desert. To his left, miles of gently rolling hills, ground dry, cracked, barren except for tufts of the barely-green flora bursting through the fissures. He doesn’t look to the right. It’s the same. It’s all the same.

Richie lets his eyes flutter shut, sun streaming through his lids. He will call a tow truck. He will call a cab, pay whatever is needed. The punishing heat of the desert coaxes sweat from his pores, leaving Richie damp _and_ warm, possibly the worst of combinations, and he would be until he was seated in a taxi with a driver who did not expect to be crossing the desert on a normal Thursday afternoon.

He cannot bring himself to move yet, hands gripping his bloodied shirt like a lifeline, like the last link to this world that slips away, dizzy with heat and fatigue. More cars pass by—two, maybe three—but he keeps his eyes closed, the overbearing silence of the desert only punctured by uncaring engines with destinations in mind.

His throat is tight, although he is not sure where the line between _thirsty_ and _verge of tears_ rests. The lump resting high in his windpipe suggests the latter, although he would not say no to some water. If he focuses, he can see the water bottle in his mind, sharper than a memory, clearer than a dream, warming rapidly in his cupholder. As if the car was not hot enough as it was, with no A/C, manual windows, and not enough space for the cooler he almost brought. Should have brought. There’s a lot more, he thinks, that he would have packed had he known he would strand himself in the Arizona desert.

He doesn’t notice the rumble of a slowing engine, the ignition turning off, the sound of a car door opening, until a voice, too loud for the quiet desert, calls out, “Car okay?”

Richie’s eyes snap open, world too bright, too blurry. His glasses had slipped down his sweat-slick nose. He pushes them up his face with the edge of his hand, still gripping his button down, blood dried and crusted now. If he tried to remove the shirt, he would probably reopen the scrapes.

It takes a moment, even with his glasses situated, for the world to come back into focus, for him to find the source of the voice, to notice the black, imposing muscle car that is parked only yards away from where he leans on his little Echo. His eyes settle on the driver, standing on the road, but still shielded behind his door, as if waiting to be told to move along. Richie meets his wide, doe-like eyes. His breath catches in his throat. _Beautiful_ , he thinks, although maybe it is the car, the suit, the summer’s day, the structured jaw, the soft hair, the eyes. _Beautiful_ , he concludes.

“Cars are supposed to leak grey smoke and screech, right?” he asks. The man blinks rapidly, then frowns. He jerks his head back to shoulder check, like he’s still in the car, before slamming his door and approaching Richie.

“That doesn’t sound good, but I can take a look at it,” the man says.

He doesn’t wait for an answer, which is for the best as Richie’s eyes trail over his face, his neck, the well-tailored button-down under the well-tailored navy suit jacket. The man shrugs out of the jacket, folding it neatly and placing it on top of his hood. Richie follows his hands, eyes lingering on the hood of the car. It is a sleek, shiny black, emblazoned with a sort of golden pattern on the hood. It doesn’t look like the type of car the man would drive. A Buick, BMW, maybe a Cadillac. A car like this presumably says a lot about a man, although what, precisely, Richie did not know.

Richie knows he should say something, but he just watches as the man’s hands move to his sleeves, rolling up the crisp white shirt in measured folds. If Richie had a ruler, he would know for sure, but he swears the folds are the same width each turn. He watches the hands—rougher, calloused, nothing like the suit suggests—until both sleeves rest folded above his sharp elbows, stretching around the muscle of his bicep. Richie’s mouth waters.

“What, and help it select a balanced investment portfolio?” he hears himself say, tearing his eyes from the man’s arms.

His frown deepens, a crease striking down between his eyes, wild brows pulling together. “What?”

“Ooh, or help it commit tax fraud?” Richie continues, tilting his head, picking the next comparator.

“Oh, you’re saying I look like a suit,” the man says, rolling his eyes, and rounding Richie’s car before he could really even _agree_ to let him look, or even _confirm_ he needed help. Maybe Richie was a skilled mechanic, just basking in the blinding sun.

“You’re literally wearing a suit. In Nevada. In August,” Richie says.

“Arizona,” the man corrects, voice light. Richie bounces his hip from the car, following the man with his gaze. “Do you want me to look at your car or not?”

His hands are stilled, fingers resting on the burning hood, prodding the chipping paint and the silver metal underneath. Richie doesn’t say anything, but leans through the open window of the car to pop the hood. As he pulls out from the window, he rounds the car, not standing next to the man but staying here he can watch him work. The heat is starting to get to him, he thinks. The world looks hazy on its edges as the man leans over the engine, eyes narrowing in focus.

“No dice,” he says quickly, pulling away from the hood. He points down at something and Richie’s eyes follow his finger. He waits, staring at Richie’s face, until his eyes settle on a metal pulley.

“You see this?” Richie nods, entranced. “It’s your timing belt. It goes through here,” he gestures at a complex-looking arrangement of cogs, “to synchronize the shafts, so your engine valves open and close at the right time. It’s snapped completely, done some other damage to surrounding engine components.”

He doesn’t think he needs to know this, specifically. He thinks _no dice_ was sufficient. He doesn’t know much about cars but he was pretty sold on not driving it after the billowing, acetic smoke that made his eyes water and throat.

“ _Synchronizing shafts_. Finally, something I can get on board with,” he says, before he can stop himself, and then tenses where he stands. 

Arizona. Red state. Suit. Muscle car. Mistake. It’s one thing to stand in a theatre where people pay to see him, mostly knowing what to expect. Richie is never careful with all his jokes, but is always careful with some of them. He remembers an article, May or March, an M-month certainly, from Phoenix this year, one slur, ten people, an assault. _Mistake_ , Richie thinks, wondering if his brain will ever figure out how to catch up to his mouth.

Instead, the man’s lips quirk, blinking as if surprised. His mouth drops open to let out a soft _huff_ , almost a laugh. Richie forgets what he was worried about, his mind chasing the trail of that gentle sound, wondering what combination of words will bring it back, how he could perhaps earn something louder.

Undeterred by Richie’s demonstrated disinterest in whatever is broken in his engine, the man continues, “This—this is your starter. Has your car been screeching when you start it?” Richie nods. “Hm. Would have been smart not to drive it into the desert.”

“I’m all beauty, no brains,” Richie says, and this earns another _pff_ from the man.

Richie watches this time, following the man’s eyeline once their gaze breaks. His eyes trail leisurely down Richie’s neck, lingering on his shoulders, before looking back down at the car. Heat jumps in Richie’s stomach, noticeable despite the viscous sunlight. He swallows, throat dry, nearly coughing.

The man closes the hood, firm, two hands in the middle of the hood, talking the whole time about _proper engine maintenance_ and the destructive capacity of a rogue timing belt, how Richie seems lucky that the damage is superficial, _except the belt itself. That’s fucked_ , he says assuredly. Richie lets out a laugh at the expletive, and flushes when the man smiles at him.

With the hood closed, the air settles awkwardly between them. The man doesn’t move his hands from their spot on the hood, thumbs dropping down to drag over the Toyota logo, almost framing it. He picks absently at the paint on the hood, flicking the smaller bits off to the side. His fingers are oily, grease-slick, and Richie wonders if he has ever stared so much at a stranger’s hands. He hopes not.

“Toyota red. Worst paint,” he says suddenly, as he pulls a particularly large chip loose. Richie fails to summon annoyance at the man trying to peel his car like an orange. “Chips and peels.”

Richie shrugs, tearing his eyes from the hands. The man is staring at him. He swallows. “Gives her character.”

“I imagine she needs it,” the man says. He stands fully from the car, gingerly keeping his hands clear of his body. “Want me to call a tow?”

Richie shakes his head. “It’s okay, I can do it. Thanks.”

He waits for the man to walk away, but instead he turns his body— _lithe_ , trim, even in the dress shirt, which fits so well Richie can almost trace the contours of his torso—until he leans against Richie’s hood, inches offset from where his greasy hands were resting on the metal.

“I can wait with you?” the man offers, recoiling even as the words tumble from his lips. His eyes widen, if such a thing is possibly when Richie already feels like he’s looking into a bottomless well. _Does he want to or does he not?_ Richie wonders, although he somehow doubts either of them have that answer.

He shakes his head. “No, really, it’s all right. I’m calling a cab anyway, running late.” He isn’t sure what time it is, does not know how long they have been standing there under the scorching sun, cloudless sky, endless desert.

“Where are you heading?” the man asks, voice level, tilting his head back and closing his eyes.

Richie thought it was the heat before that made his vision blur and his world slow to a stutter, to a stop, that he was exhausted from _not sleeping_ and _endless shows_ and _all this fucking driving_. He wonders now if he’s asleep, if he is dreaming something pure, something beautiful, something gentler than the dreams plaguing him lately (chilly gardens with lush plants, with something violent in the hedges, something unseen, lurking—was it frightened or frightening? He had not yet found out). Here, on an endless stretch of highway leading him from one show to the next, he dreams of a stranger in a suit, presence so comforting it borders on familiar, on the known. The man leans, long neck bared, eyes closed, face towards the sun like the heat isn’t suffocating. Maybe he can’t feel it.

“Phoenix,” he says finally, the word falling off his tongue almost mangled, mispronounced, uncertain.

“Want a lift?” the man asks, not looking at Richie this time. His face is still upturned, eyes closed, a sunflower straining towards the sky.

Richie swallows his words, cycling through them, trying to settle on the right answer, if there is one: _seriously? Only if it’s not out of the way. No, really, thank you. I couldn’t put you out like that. No. Thanks, but I’ll take a cab. Will you let me pay for gas? Why help me? Why here? Why Phoenix?_

He settles on the only thing that feels right. “Yes. Yes.”

He wonders if that _was_ the right answer. The man remains still, perched on his hood, dreamlike, sun haloing his face. Behind him the desert stretches on, dusty expanse meeting the pure azure horizon at the edge of the world, at the edge of everything he can see. Richie looks only at the figure on the hood of his car, so tranquil another sound, another breath, another blink and he might disappear. Richie blinks. The man snaps his head to look at him.

“Your hands okay?”

There was never a tension settled between them in the silence. At most the air felt thicker, heavier, warmer. Richie shakes his head. “Yeah—I just—I fell getting out of the car.”

The man pushes off the car and crosses the gap between them quicker than he should move, _zero to sixty_ , Richie thinks wildly, and reaches for Richie’s hands.

He lets the stranger peel away his shirt, delicate tugs where the skin sticks, slow, careful. When his hands are free, none of the scrapes have reopened, but his hands are spattered with dry blood, clotted over ragged tears, skin settling from the burnt-pink to the gentle tan he has been sporting, all the sunny days and summer drives.

“Clumsy?” the man asks, biting the inside of his cheek.

“I’m all legs!”

“I can see that,” he says. _I was looking_ , he doesn’t say. Richie thinks he hears it anyway. “I’ll patch you up.”

* * *

Never has Richie known a man in a muscle car— _a Firebird_ , the stranger said, offended that Richie couldn’t recognize it—to carry such an array of supplies, but he is grateful for the granola bar, the wet wipes, and the full first aid kit as he leans on its hood, hands wiped clean, sanitized, bandaged (arguably to excess), and less hungry than he had been a moment ago.

The man leans, phone pressed between his ear and shoulder, as he tucks away the supplies, muttering into the phone _yes, about four miles past Willow Beach, red Toyota Echo, 2004. Uh-huh. Yeah. Starter. Timing belt. No, just the car._ Richie doesn’t remember telling him the year of his car, and wonders absently if that’s a _thing_ that car guys do.

While he waits for the man to finish the call, Richie unloads his car, embarrassed at the sight of it. Takeout bags crushed in the backseat, discarded soda cups, straw wrappers like season-appropriate tinsel scattered throughout. Not saving any turtles, not in his car at least. Richie takes his keys, separating the car key from the others for the first time since he moved to LA, since he got his apartment. He leaves the key to Holly for the first time, barely out of one unfamiliar state and barely into another. He saves his water bottle, choking back a few gulps of water nearly warm enough to shower in. He only has the one suitcase, packed as light as he can, and he shoves the water bottle into the outer pocket.

He hauls the suitcase over to the rear of the car— _Firebird_ , he reminds himself, because when he called it that the first time, after the man’s disappointment, he earned a smile. The man frowns, and snaps hurriedly at the voice on the other end of the line. When he hangs up, he directs the frown at Richie.

“Really? That’s it?” he asks, snapping, mad. Richie blinks. “You’re not going to, like, take a picture of my license plate? My face? Ask for my driver’s license? Send my picture to a friend?” At Richie’s puzzled look, the man’s voice gets louder, pitching higher. “What if I was a _murderer_?” 

Richie’s face splits wide, mouth parting in a goofy smile. “You seem like a smart guy, you’d get away with it even if I did all that.”

“What—that’s—that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. I’d be _too good of a murderer_ so why even try?” the man says, nearly spitting out the words, still talking too fast, too loud, arms moving too much. He can’t quite look away.

“You get me!” Richie says. He pauses briefly, adding, “although, if the temptation strikes, I should warn you that I’m doing a show tonight at the Talking Stick, so you only have a small window before people notice.”

The man’s anger appears to dissipate and he tilts his head. “What kind of show?”

“Stand-up.”

“Huh. Big venue. You any good?” The man tugs Richie’s suitcase out of his hands, lifting it without effort into the back of the car. The muscles of his arms, his shoulders, twist and ease with the motion.

“I think I’m pretty funny,” he says eventually, when his luggage is secure in the back of the car, tucked next to the first aid kit.

“I can tell,” the man says, voice teasing but not mean. “I guess I’ll save my murderous plans for the next wayward traveller.”

Richie laughs at this, a full, belly-deep laugh, eyes crinkling, and he’s not too distracted to notice the man’s pleased smile. “You’re funny too!”

He only gets a shrug—small, non-committal, uncertain, like maybe no one has ever told him he’s funny—before the man closes the trunk and rounds the car, pulling open the passenger door for Richie.

“Last chance to phone a friend, stranger.”

“Richie. Richie Tozier,” he says, feeling that inkling of dread that always creeps up his spine when he introduces himself, begging either _not to be recognized_ or _not to have someone think he wants to be._

“Eddie Kaspbrak,” the no-longer-stranger says, enunciating the _pb_ , nearly exaggerated, as if he has spent years correcting people and is simply tired of the niceties.

“Nice to meetcha, Eds,” Richie says finally, slipping into the passenger seat.

“ _Eddie_ ,” he insists, closing the passenger door on him as Richie opens his mouth again.

The interior of Eddie’s car put his Echo to shame. He shifts on the comfortable, plush leather seats, worn gently with use but intact, well-kept, thighs burning a little where flesh meets the sun-warmed seat. As Eddie slides in and turns the engine over, Richie’s eyes skitter over the dash, the textured silver backsplash, the meters-fuel, speed, battery, the one about rotations-all inlaid in stark black circles against the metal. The radio thrums to life, buzzing low, no input. From the cassette player dangles an auxiliary cord, already plugged into Eddie’s phone.

“You can slide the seat back,” Eddie says, wrenching Richie’s attention away from the interior of the car. His lips curl softly upwards. “You drive a small car for a big guy.”

Although not uncomfortable in his skin, not exactly, comments like that, like _you’re a big guy_ , typically go straight to the part of himself he hates the most, his prickling insecurities. Forty and alone, soft and doughy in all the wrong places, gangly at the same time with limbs stretching and folding to fit themselves into places otherwise too small. He spent years folding himself into his Echo. Eddie’s car is roomy, his voice is warm-not soft, too loud, speech patterns too inconsistent to be called soft. _Big guy_ makes Richie’s stomach flutter instead of turn. He slides the seat back.

“Holly never steered me wrong!” he says, resettling now, even more leg room, knees not bunched to the dash. “Well, before today.”

“Pretty sure you steered her wrong today.”

“I got her to the side of the highway!”

Eddie frowns as he fidgets with his phone, dismissing several notifications. “She shouldn’t have been _on the highway_.”

Eddie, hands too calloused for his office job and too rough for a caretaker, asked him about the car when he cleaned the cuts on Richie’s hands. _Like mistletoe?_ he had asked, although the only thing in common was Christmas and lush green leaves and maybe some stolen kisses as the meaning of each plant is confused, disregarded. _Like Buddy_ , he replied, and Eddie laughed, a bubbling brook of a sound falling past his lips. He hummed familiar chords as he brushed asphalt from the cuts, starting with _Look at Me_ and ending with _Words of Love_.

“But then I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of your company,” Richie says, aiming for a joke and missing, voice too earnest, too thick, anxious as the thought hits the air of the car. Eddie doesn’t look up from his phone but he smiles again.

“What time’s your show?” he asks, Spotify popping up from his menu bar. His recommendations are nearly all podcasts.

“Eight.”

“We’ll make it.”

Eddie’s fingers hover over the screen, face pinched. Richie darts his eyes down to peek at what a man like Eddie Kas _pb_ rak listens to when rolling across state lines, already speculating—the Daily? TED Talks? Economist? His eyes instead land on a familiar podcast cover, 10:18 seconds into a lengthy episode.

“Oh shit, is that Part II?” Eddie blinks, eyes snapping up from the phone. “Mormonism?”

“Yeah,” he says, shoulders shifting, dropping. Richie did not notice them tense, the anxiety shooting up Eddie’s spine at the thought of finding a happy medium. “You listen?”

“Yeah, I do. Haven’t gotten to this episode yet. Don’t change on my account. Joseph do anything interesting so far?”

Eddie just smiles, exhaling a soft _hn_ from deep in his throat. Richie tears his eyes from Eddie’s neck, watching his hands around his phone, securing the aux cord, dragging the playback bar to 00:00, and hitting play. Sound pours from the stereo, nothing like modern cars, the familiar intro tingly, even a little tinny, as it pours through the speakers.

Richie’s eyes close for a moment, letting the voices wash over him—not relaxing, loud and manic voices layering over each other as one of the hosts tells a personal story, an absurd story. The content doesn’t matter for a heartbeat, even as the crudeness of the retelling threatens to break through his reverie. Instead, Richie absorbs the heat of the desert, the leathery scent of the car, the sound on the speakers so beautiful it’s like he set the needle down on his dad’s old record player, like he is in his parent’s living room watching them slow dance, as in love today as Richie remembered growing up, maybe _more_ than ever.

When he opens his eyes again, Eddie is staring at him. Not a sudden look, a glance, but a lingering gaze, ready to meet his eyes as soon as they opened. He was waiting. He thinks absently that a look like this—intense, unflinching, like trying to decipher fine print on a parking ticket—ought to make him squirm, look away. He stares back instead, looking for nothing in particular in the wide brown eyes. 

Eddie’s lips twist upwards into a smile, he breaks their gaze, and shifts into drive. Richie breathes, unsteady, _what the fuck_ , and watches Holly until she disappears in his side mirror, in the rearview.

* * *

The silence between them is comfortable, settling in the car like morning dew or winter’s frost, clinging but not cloying, in between each conversation. The two of them both overly invested in the podcast, making occasional remarks on the story or the hosts, both of them trying to cobble together the pieces, trying to remember the prior episode. The stereo is cranked loud, obnoxiously so, as most of the audio floats out the open windows. Eddie’s hair, resolutely gelled into place, has already flung loose from the force of the cross-winds through their windows.

He tried to tease Eddie about being a car guy and not even having the skills to install an AC unit in the Firebird, and got a rant, arms waving and brow scrunched, about the _big debate in the restoration community_ and if he wanted air conditioning he would _buy a new fucking car_. He proceeds to explain the process of installing an AC unit, how it’s really quite easy, how Richie could get it done on the Echo for a good deal, especially from his guy.

Eddie’s tirade is cut short when Richie’s phone rings. It’s on vibrate, but pressed right against the seatbelt through his pocket, and the rattling sound makes them both jolt. Richie wiggles, fishing his hand into his pocket, bandaged fingers making it difficult to get a grip. When he gets it out of the pocket, he drops it hard on the centre console, making Eddie chuckle, before finally hitting the green button.

“Hello darling!” Richie says, cheerily. He immediately puts the call on speaker, Stan’s contact picture flooding the screen, and Eddie frowns, pulling one hand from the wheel to pause the podcast, midway through a host’s bubbling laughter, at 38:17.

“Oh good! You’re alive! Thanks for answering my texts! I thought you were dead in the desert!” Stan yells, as loud as his voice goes, tinged with the manic sound of someone who _definitely_ opened Find My Friends, googled distances between Vegas and Phoenix, and identified the closest tow company.

“Not dead. Fell out of my car. Hands too bloody to text,” Richie says, voice not as apologetic as he feels. He can see now the _31 missed texts_ from Stan. His murder would have been noticed far quicker than the estimate he gave Eddie.

Stan’s voice pitches higher. “Then phone me? Fuck. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. You were right about Holly.”

“ _I know I was_ ,” Stan says, judgmental but never veering to smug. It’s always concern first. “Are you going to make your show?”

“Yes, a handsome stranger picked me up in his Firebird and we’re cruuuuuuuuuising down the 93,” Richie says, voice alight. He can see Eddie suck his cheek between his teeth, trying not to smile. He fails miserably.

Stan can kill a man with a single sentence, deadpan delivery, eyes fixed on you like he can read your mind and see your soul and he’s _not impressed_ , in between all the times when Stan is kind, tender, and loving. Stan’s silences are even louder. Richie can almost see him pinching his forehead, deepening the creases that grow more prominent every day.

“Tell me that’s a joke.”

“Nope!” Pure glee. Stan groans. “Stan, this is Eddie, Eddie, this is Stan.”

“Hi Stan,” Eddie says, amused, eyes flickering down to the contact photo. He can’t blame him. It’s a deeply sexy photo of Stan that Stan absolutely _despises_ that Richie has a copy of. He can blame his lovely wife for that one.

“Uh-huh. I’m going to need a little more information, Rich.” 

A drawer opens and closes on the other side of the line, the sound of something clattering. He can picture Stan at his desk, at work, high-rise, all glass, scrambling for paper to write down every detail he can scrape together. He would get the results of a background check by end of day, and would probably have all his IRS records by morning, Richie muses, fond.

“Happily, Staniel! Short, dark, handsome—”

“Average height,” Eddie growls, interrupting.

“I would say about 5’8—”

“ _5’9!_ ”

“Bambi eyes, fluffy hair, thousand dollar suit, not afraid to get his hands dirty but still keeps wet wipes in his car, also —”

Richie is cut off by Eddie. Eyes still pinned to the road, one hand on the wheel, Eddie leans fully into the passenger side of the car, shoulder brushing Richie’s chest, as he pops open the glove compartment. He fumbles with the insurance first, then a stress ball, the white letters emblazoned on its surface faded, unreadable, before grabbing his wallet. He closes the glove and drops his wallet into Richie’s lap.

“He’ll send you a photo of my driver’s license. Black 1978 Firebird. Nevada plates, 894 H13. Work at Greenberg Traurig, Vegas office.”

A pen on paper, Stan’s tiny, cramped writing, only half-cursive, scribbling every detail down. Richie flips open Eddie’s wallet, an incredibly normal layout of cards meeting his eyes, and fishes out his driver’s license. It annoys him that Eddie can look _good_ in a DMV photo, deep scowl set into his face but put-together, clean-shaven, all angles. Richie’s driver’s license looks like he rolled in hungover on the last day to renew. He fires off a photo of the license to Stan, followed by a series of emojis: 🥵🎟🛏🍆🍑💦.

Stan’s pen finally stops, gentle sound of metal touching down to wood. “At least your kidnapper is looking out for you. Thanks, Eddie.”

Stan continues, voice level as the photo comes through with a _chirp_. Richie gets back a string of judgmental emojis: 🙅🏻♂️🛑❌⛔️⚠️🙅🏻♂️. “Any of the Vegas shows the one?”

“Nah, don’t think so. Rep is still talking about the Salt Lake City energy.”

Stan _hmms_ softly. “Hanging in there?”

Richie shrugs even though Stan can’t see him, uncomfortable about the trajectory the conversation took, whiplash from Stan, as always, shifting from _Richie, you idiot_ to _I care about you_ , even though Richie knew by now the sentiment of both was the same.

“You know how I hang. I’ll call you when I get there?”

“You better,” Stan says, voice laced with a light threat. “And while I would understand the urge, possibly better than anyone, if you hurt him, no one will ever find your body, Kaspbrak.”

“Loud and clear,” Eddie says, a smile on his face but skilfully schooling his voice, nearly reverential. Suck up.

Richie rolls his eyes. “He’s most often regarded as quiet and cryptic.”

“Fuck off. Love you,” Stan says, voice dipping as close to _soft_ as it gets.

“Yeah yeah love you too,” Richie says quickly, then ends the call.

A text comes in almost the second he does, reading _Has the pool really run so dry that you’re hitchhiking for a date?_ To which he responds, height of maturity, _Let me in the middle of your marriage and I’ll stop looking for love in all the wrong places_. Stan doesn’t dignify that with a response.

When Richie raises his head from his phone screen, pleased as ever when he stuns Stan to silence, Eddie is looking at him again, his face, his neck, then his hands. Not the phone screen, but his hands. His eyes flicker back to the road. He reaches over to resume the podcast, timestamp ticking along, but sets the volume lower.

“Boyfriend?” he asks, walking a thin line between curiosity and disappointment that makes Richie’s heart stutter, staccato, then pound in his chest.

“If only. Best friend. Married, kids, the whole shebang.”

Eddie’s grip on the steering wheel loosens, both hands sliding down to 8 and 4, coaxing the car lazily around another bend in the road. Richie watches his hands as they move. “He seems nice.”

“Oh, nice is what you gleaned from that conversation?” Richie asks. Eddie just nods.

“You got any boyfriend?” The question comes out steady, even, but his jaw works as soon as they leave. He’s nervous and choosing to ask anyway. Richie begs his heart to calm down, to slow to a normal pace. _It’s a long drive_ , he tells himself.

“Nope,” Richie says, popping the P. “Alas, just like my comedy special, I’m still looking for the one.”

“The one for what?”

Richie waves his hand in the air. “You know, _the one_. For all time, all space. This life and the next. To infinity and beyond. However you wanna cut it.”

“You believe in that?”

“Sure do, Eds. It’s a miserable life otherwise.”

He tries to sound joking. He shouldn’t have to try. Levity comes to him like breathing, blinking, speaking. It is unfair that when he struggles with one he struggles with all, that his breath keeps catching in his throat when their eyes meet, that his eyes ache, dry and sore, when he stares at Eddie a little too long.

“Edd _ie_. I was actually asking about your comedy special,” Eddie says.

“Oh, that,” Richie says, embarrassment flooding in, a flush crawling up his skin, already too warm and damp from the heat of the drive. Eddie flashes him a glance, unfazed, nearly smiling. _Nothing to be embarrassed about_ , the look says, the corner of his mouth whispers as it twists. The mortification evaporates as quickly as it arrived. “You know, the one Netflix is going to pump out of its content machine to bare my insecurities to the world.”

“You have a Netflix special?”

“This is number two, baby,” he says, winking. It earns him an exaggerated eye roll.

“Wouldn’t have pegged you for a celebrity.”

It’s not like Richie is _famous_. His first special was popular—too popular, but he supposes the drama of coming out halfway through a tour and changing the entire trajectory of your career will do that. He did his meander around town after that, a guest spot on SNL, some small appearances on various half hour shows, a recurring small character on a new show airing in the fall, but this tour is meant to be his real breakout, his first full run of material that finally felt like _his_ , not a regurgitation of his image.

It still feels nice to be in a car with someone who had _no idea who he was_ and seems at best disinterested, at worst disdainful, of his face being splattered across the Netflix homepage.

“What about me screams _failing comedian_?”

“Hmm. Car, clothes, ratty suitcase, driving instead of flying,” Eddie lists, like he had them ready, waiting for Richie to ask. His eyes flick away from the road for a second, staring at Richie’s head. “Haircut.”

Richie laughs, head thrown back, neck exposed. He knows Eddie looks. He wants him to. “Well, at least you didn’t say that I’m not funny.”

Eddie lets out a huffed breath, looking ahead at the road again. They are on a long stretch, straight and narrow, splitting the desert clean in two. They feel like the only car on the road, Eddie cruising above the speed limit, windows open, wind stealing their words.

“No, I didn’t.”

* * *

Richie is not sure what’s happening in the podcast, something about _his body is too beautiful, his mind is too swift, his voice is too sweet, there’s no way he can just have an office job_ , which Richie knows is about some figure in mythos but may as well be an ode to Eddie. He blinks, timestamp reading _1:15:37_ , and wonders wildly how only an hour could have passed, how they haven’t been on this same road for hours, maybe days.

Eddie is telling him a story. He’s not a good storyteller in the strict sense—so far, not one of them has gone anywhere (although several have sprouted into monstrous sub-stories), not one of them was particularly funny, and several had ended abruptly prompting Richie to ask _dude that wasn’t a story_ and Eddie to reply _fuck you for not listening then_ , before launching into another. He certainly has spirit, though. He tells stories with his whole body, gesturing as much as he can in the confines of the car, talking too fast like he cannot wait for the next part, asks questions in the same high pitch, harsh intonation at the end like he’s interrogating Richie each time he asks. They are nearly always rhetorical, but Eddie yells, trying not to laugh and failing, whenever he answers one: _Do you think that casino employees give a single fuckaroo what you order to drink? Do you think they haven’t heard EVERYTHING? Do you think being clever pays off?_ he yells, recounting a rather pedestrian story of a man he overheard at the Cosmo ordering a _magnum blowjob_. Richie responds: _being clever has paid me well_. Eddie sputters wildly at that.

The current story starts out about his “one and only experience in an Uber”, as if that isn’t an absurd thing for someone living in Vegas to say, but quickly detours into the _morality_ of the company, some cross-border conflict about a Dutch arbitration clause and a Canadian class action that completely loses Richie, but he laughs anyway, which gets Eddie insisting that it’s _not funny_ because Uber is trying to _shirk its responsibilities as an employer_ , etc. He insists that he represents some shitty fuckers but at least he doesn’t do Uber’s dirty work.

“And the service? Shit!” he says, inching back toward the original story. “Jason, that was his name, maybe it wasn’t his fault, but I was just going to the airport, which is like, the only place you _need_ to know how to get to, and the sign said airport left, and he turned? Right? He was using Google Maps? She said _go left fuckhead_?”

“I don’t think that’s quite what Google sounds like,” Richie squeezes out through his laughter, big guffaws too large for something so mundane, but Eddie talks as fast as sound itself and it goes straight to Richie’s head, like a shot, like the first hit from a joint.

“Oh, are you an expert on all of Google’s navigation commands?”

“Definitely more of an expert than you. You’re on a four hour drive with no GPS man,” Richie says, gesturing at Eddie’s phone, screen only showing the podcast that ticks along as they continue to talk.

Eddie scoffs. “I’ve driven this trip hundreds of times. You know, people used to drive across the country without GPS for years.”

“All right grandpa, tell me more about the good old days when you wrote with a stone and chisel and walked five miles to get to school.”

“You know those are dramatically different periods of time,” Eddie says, glaring.

Richie waves him off. “I’m just saying, I’ve driven to the same Starbucks near my house everyday for the last two years and I still plug it into Google Maps.”

“I love that you think that factoid makes you sound like the rational one.”

“Factoid?” Richie asks, brows raised. Eddie’s furrow in direct rebellion.

“A small fact, dipshit.” 

“Oh, I know. I just don’t think I’ve ever heard a human being say it.”

This provokes another rant, shorter this time, about how Richie _couldn’t have_ heard anyone _but_ a human say the word because humans are the only species with language, that _factoid_ isn’t exactly translatable to a bee’s flight pattern or a dog’s bark. It’s annoying. It’s utterly charming.

“That’s a pretty long drive,” Richie says, interrupting. Eddie glares for a moment after being cut off. “I mean, to do everyday.”

“I don’t. I drive down Thursdays, drive back Sundays,” Eddie says. 

“Secret double life?”

Eddie lifts his right hand to place it on the steering wheel, both hands sliding to 10 and 2, fingers flexing tightly around the wheel. Richie misses his hand, though they were not touching, not really, just Richie’s elbow on the centre console so he could lean a little into Eddie’s space, Eddie’s arm resting next to him, fingers dangling off the edge of the console, skin touching skin on the occasional bumps and sways of the drive. Eddie swallows and Richie watches his throat work.

“No. Shared custody. Easier to move me than her.”

Richie’s eyes flash to his hands for a moment. There was no ring, he was sure. He hadn’t seen one. He would have noticed. There was not so much as a tan where the ring would have laid. 

“Divorced?”

“Yeah,” he says, grip on the steering wheel loosening a bit, but shoulders still tense all the way across. He is almost a different person, Richie thinks, like this. Nervous. 

“Congrats?” Richie tries, and Eddie’s shoulders drop. He swallows again, this time smiling and nodding a little.

“Yeah. She’s the worst,” Eddie declares. Then, as if an afterthought, adds, “and I’m gay.”

“Huh. I’m surprised.”

“No, you aren’t,” Eddie says, amused. He loosens his fingers on the wheel again, dropping his right arm back down to the console, this time letting their limbs press together. Eddie’s forearm—tanned, dusted with dark hair that grew unevenly, freckled—pressed against the bend of Richie’s elbow.

“No, I’m not,” he agrees, amiably, pressing back. “What’s your daughter’s name?”

“Gabrielle.”

“Eds and Gabs. That’s so cute!” It earns him what he supposes is an attempt at a death glare, but years of being friends with Stan has left him impervious.

“You can’t give her a nickname before you meet her,” Eddie scolds, when Richie survives the glare. _Before_. He doesn’t seem to notice his choice of words. It barely registers with Richie, except as a gentle pull in his chest.

“Come on, Kaspbrak, what kind of dad are you? Where are the photos?”

Eddie laughs at that, scowl slipping from his face. He reaches for the glovebox again, this time resting his elbow on Richie’s thigh, bracing hard enough to give him a charley horse that makes Richie yelps and Eddie laugh harder. He lifts his elbow, patting around again for his wallet. He’s so close like this, shoulder in front of Richie’s chest, inches apart, brushing together as Eddie finally locates his wallet. He drops it in Richie’s lap.

“Really? No phone photos?”

“Too many to pick my favourites. Wallet has a curated selection.”

It hasn’t even been an hour since the last time he opened the wallet, but this time he really looks at it—plain, black, but embossed with the Gucci _G_ s. He wishes he noticed earlier, feeling like he missed the mark to laugh at him (if you’re going to buy the plainest wallet in the world, why pay $600 for it?). Richie had never been very good with the passing of time.

Eddie grumbles _left pocket_ , but Richie takes his time. He pats the driver’s license, an old friend now, and pokes through the rest of the contents. Eddie complains, low in his throat, a half-hearted sound that Richie ignores. Shiny gold Amex, for the Gucci, he assumes, another two credit cards, business cards, a gift card for some place called _Avery’s_. Some of the business cards are his, _Edward Kaspbrak, Partner_ written in plain, clean text on a stylish card, heavy paper, firm branding on both sides. He pulls one out with a flourish, tucking it into the pocket of his shorts. 

“Bottom one is my cell,” Eddie says, smiling now.

Richie opens the bill pocket, rolling his eyes because _of course_ Eddie still carries cash, neat twenties and fifties laid flat and lined up like they were straight out of an ATM. He finally pokes into the left pocket of the wallet and finds several tightly-packed pictures, on good quality matte photo paper.

Richie is bad with age, especially with kids. Gabrielle is young, primary school, but seems tall for her age, especially in a photo where she stands next to a woman he assumes to be Eddie’s ex. He bites back a joke and shuffles through the photos, finding one of Eddie and her, sitting at a kitchen table, locked in what looks like a vicious match of Connect 4. Sitting across from each other, they look so alike—same large, round eyes, piercing stares, dark brown hair, fluffy brows. Richie’s chest tightens.

“Cute kid. She’s going to be taller than her dad.”

“Shut up,” Eddie growls, like a man who _already knows_. “You like kids?”

Richie nods vigorously, tucking the photos away. “Love them. Stan and his wife, Patty, have a toddler. Eli. My godson, which I definitely didn’t cry about and definitely don’t still cry about sometimes.”

When Eddie looks at him this time, he isn’t smiling. His face is drawn in, lips pursed. He looks at Richie, opening his mouth slightly, then pressing his lips back together. A question. Maybe a question he doesn’t know how to ask. Maybe he doesn’t even know the question. They meet eyes instead, hurtling dangerously above the speed limit down an empty highway, Eddie’s left hand loose on the wheel and right arm still pressed against Richie’s. Neither concerned about crashing. Richie doesn’t know the question, or the answer, or really maybe _anything_ except the tightness in his chest and the itch in his hands, begging him to touch Eddie, to take his hand to cradle his cheek, smooth out the lines and the confusion. Eddie’s face relaxes into a smile.

“She likes Gabby,” he says, looking back at the road. “She would probably like Gabs.”

“You pick her up Thursdays?”

Eddie shakes his head. “Friday mornings, early, and then back Sunday at bedtime.”

The podcast outro plays, hosts signing off. Richie thinks absently that he will have to listen to that again, find out what happened, what he missed. He thinks he may listen to it over and over and over, back in Holly, back in LA, in between sets, to remember the sound of Eddie complaining over it, about firm cafeteria coffee, Vegas light pollution, and occasionally, nothing at all.

The next episode starts to play, but Eddie fiddles with his phone, unplugging it, stopping the playback. He glances at his lock screen, skimming the notifications, and places his phone down in a cupholder.

His hands return to the stereo, untangling the AUX cord for extra length before extending it to Richie. When Richie doesn’t take it right away, he wiggles the cord expectantly. Richie, suddenly self-conscious of his music, his playlists, his tastes, hestitates. Eddie raises the cord further, wiggling it directly in Richie’s face, warm metal prong poking him first in the cheeks, then the nose, then almost the eye, cackling and poking him until Richie snatches it out of his hands.

Eddie tells him not to play anything _annoying_ , like Richie is supposed to know what sort of genres Eddie likes or hates, what sort of vocalists he prefers, what sort of sounds. He thinks he knows anyway.

* * *

If you asked him this morning, Richie would have said he wanted nothing more than to be at his home, in his bed, and getting enough sleep that it technically qualified as a short coma. Now, what he wants most in the world is to catalogue every strange and unusual item Eddie seems to keep in his car at all times.

“It’s not weird to have a cooler in the car with water bottles. I don’t have AC and live in the desert,” Eddie insists.

“Fine, I can call that _overprepared_ , but a car kettle? A _selection_ of hot beverage options? This is better stocked than my hotel minibar.”

“Stay in better hotels, then,” Eddie says, as if _that_ was the point.

Richie has gotten a taste of the absurd things in Eddie’s car and he has to know more. He had complained about putting his water bottle in his suitcase, and Eddie stared at him like he had three heads. He leaned, not shy about taking his eyes off the road like an _absolute fucking maniac_ , steady hand on the wheel, reaching an arm somewhere into the backseat behind Richie.

Their faces were close, too close, Eddie keeping their eyes locked as he unzipped something behind his seat, rustled around, lips so close that a bump in the road could have pressed them together. And then the zipper was closing behind him and Eddie settled back into his seat like everything he did wasn’t upending Richie’s grip on reality.

Eddie had dropped a water bottle, icy cold and slick from condensation, right into his lap. When Richie stared at it, confused, Eddie just said _I mean I have coffee and tea too but water is essential to proper hydration_. Richie is still boggled by the calculated chaos required to say things so absurd with such conviction.

Richie sips his water, flipping through his Spotify. Has water ever tasted so good? Sweet, icy, soothing, like dropping into your own bed after a long day. Was it the heat? The company? Eddie glares at him and he knows the answer.

“Are you going to pick a fucking song or are we just going to listen to the opening chords of everything ever written?” he demands, as Richie skips another song mid-sentence.

“I’m making us a _playlist_ , Eds. I need to get the vibes right,” he insists, listening to the first twenty seconds of a familiar song before dropping it into the playlist. He knows the lyrics, he knows the songs, it’s just about picking the right ones.

Eddie’s brow furrows, and Richie wonders why his face isn’t just stuck like that. “Why?”

“Well a playlist without a vibes is just a jumbled collection of songs,” Richie says, adding another to the list.

Eddie makes an exasperated sound. “No, why are you making a playlist?”

“It’s a road trip! We need a playlist!” Richie says, waving this time as he lets a song drag on a little longer. _We need to fetch back the time they’ve stolen from us_.

“So you were sitting in your car in silence before? That’s pretty weird.”

“Don’t be silly spaghetti, I was listening to a playlist.” 

Eddie doesn’t react to the nickname audibly, but his eyes close, the longest blink in history, and his lips purse, little creases appearing on his lips, his nose, his eyes, like he’s trying to figure out whether acknowledging it is worse than letting it lie. Richie doesn’t care what he chooses because at least he got to witness _this._

“So put that on?” Eddie says finally, electing to ignore the nickname.

“No, no, that one wasn’t right. That was a solo roadtrip playlist. This one is just for us,” Richie says, words leaving his mouth before he can think about them, before he can wonder if _I’m making a playlist for you_ is an absurd thing to say to someone he just met. 

“You’re making me a mixtape,” Eddie says, voice strange, mouth hanging open, a tiny gap between his thin lips.

“Now you get it!” Richie says. If you’ve already said it, might as well double down.

“Gonna ask me to go steady next?” Eddie asks.

Their eyes meet again, Eddie’s pupils wide, his lips quirked, tone teasing but not mean. And maybe it’s the oppressive heat of the desert, or the way their arms are still pressed together on the console, or the song he let play so long it _has_ to go on the playlist now, volume so loud that the world could hear if it was listening, but Richie feels strangely like this has happened before, like this would happen again, like Eddie had asked him this question a million times before and he had answered it.

“Maybe I will.” 

When he finally says it, the words are so familiar, so natural, that he doesn’t have to think before they fall from his mouth. From the grin on Eddie’s face—wide, sudden, like he didn’t expect it and couldn’t control it—Richie thinks it was the right answer. He thinks he will. He also thinks maybe he’s going insane.

Eddie eventually looks back at the road, although he does not know how long they wait. The song finishes, and Richie skips back to add it to the playlist, his heart hammering in his chest. 

They sit in a comfortable silence, Eddie not complaining again as Richie continues to fire through songs, replaying bits over and over, removing some and adding others. Richie settles on the tracklist and fiddles with the order, shuffling songs around, knowing where he wants it to start and end and just trying to piece together the middle.

It has been a long tour. Too long. It started months ago, first the east coast, then the midwest. He had a couple weeks to breathe before he drove from LA to Seattle in one highly inadvisable go, before he started his drive down the coast, night after night of _Seattle-drive-Portland-drive-Sacramento-drive-San Francisco-drive-San Jose-drive-LA again-drive-Vegas-sputter to a stop_. He doesn’t regret driving, although the long hours had left him alone with his thoughts, gave him too much time to think about every beat at his shows, every moment, every joke that landed and joke that did not, when people laughed, whether people _really_ thought he was funny, whether his comedy was better before when it was less honest. Only flying could have been worse than being alone in a car for 41 hours.

He hasn’t been on a roadtrip with someone else in years, not since he was young and in love with someone who could never love him like he wanted, someone scared of who they were, someone who made Richie scared too. That trip was filled with furtive touches, nervous glances, arguments louder than the music played, and ended in separate beds at the same hotel rooms. He thought after that he would never want to be in a car with someone that long, that any trip was doomed to end with broken hearts and resentment. He wonders now if he was too quick to discount the romance of the drive, if maybe it was just the wrong person, the wrong time, the wrong place.

The playlist nearly finishes itself as they fly down the highway, sun hanging lower in the sky, ducking half below the edge of the window to shine directly on Richie’s face, heating his cheek. It’s too warm. He’s been sweating since he got to Vegas and even another gulp of icy water does little to calm his body.

“All right!” he yells, loud enough to startle Eddie, who swears, bitching about the dangers of distracted driving like he had not spent half the trip staring at Richie. “One playlist, curated for the remainder of our drive.”

“I’m not—I’m not really a music guy,” Eddie says, voice tense, words tumbling over themselves. He has spent their trip so self-assured, so calm, so _deadly_ like he figured Richie out the moment he met him and was determined to ruin him. “My—my dad liked Buddy Holly, so that’s why—but I don’t really know a lot of stuff. I might not—you know, get it.”

Richie lifts his elbow from the centre console, giving his aching arm a little shake, before dropping his arm back down, this time on top of Eddie’s, fingers dancing over his arm, the hair, the freckles, before reaching Eddie’s dangling hand. Eddie’s breath hitches. He gives it a little squeeze before he can chicken out, and then retreats, leaving his arm on top of Eddie’s.

“You will.” Richie presses play.

Opening piano plays and a sultry voice spills through the car. Eddie reaches over the crank the radio up, a wicked gleam in his eyes that makes Richie’s heart race. If he thought the podcast sounded dreamy, this was ethereal, crooning love songs pouring out of the speakers, too loud, sound lost out the windows. If anyone drove past them they could hear every word, maybe even know what it meant.

Eddie doesn’t talk, for the first time in their trip, and Richie misses his voice but can hardly catch his breath as he watches Eddie. His eyes are on the road, or maybe above the road, looking as far as the skyline. He bobs his head, almost imperceptibly, to the music, he smiles when he picks out a lyric he likes, he hums along, deep and languid, when they hit a song he knows. He listens so intently to the playlist, to the _mixtape_ , he called it.

They fly through the beginning of the playlist in silence, all thoughts drowned out by Eddie cracking the volume higher and higher with each song, sounding out the lyrics, humming to _new songs_ when he picks up the lyrics. The songs, dreamy by design, make the minutes melt together, make the drive achingly slow, like Richie picked the songs to make the drive last longer. He thinks he has been staring at Eddie for hours as they hit the fourth song.

He’s in his parents living room again, standing above the record player, dropping the stylus down onto the edge of a record he knows like they back of his hand, that he’s played over and over and over, and this time Eddie is there, smiling from the couch, and when Richie reaches for his hand he stands, without hesitation, and pulls Richie close. They dance until the hand lifts from the record and then sway some more.

As the fourth song slides to a leisurely end, Eddie breaks the silence. “I get it.”

* * *

The sun hangs lower in the sky now, eclipsing Richie’s face in a heat so harsh he keeps one hand up, shielding his cheek, Eddie rolling his eyes and calling him a _baby_. He’s making fun of him but his voice is sincere, lips curling around the word, sending a shiver up Richie’s spine. He thinks if Eddie looked him in the eyes and called him _baby_ in another context, he might not survive the encounter.

At the more upbeat songs, Richie sang along, aggressive, loud. The first song he sings to, Eddie stares at him with what he thinks is awe, and asks, “Is that actually your singing voice or did I somehow give you the impression that I’m into toneless screeching?”

“100% Tozier authentica, honey,” Richie says, winking heavily. A light flush springs to Eddie’s cheeks.

“Honey?”

“Not your thing?” Richie asks, innocently.

“Didn’t say that.”

Richie continues to sing, or _tonelessly screech_ , and Eddie laughs and laughs and laughs, sounds clawing out from deep in his chest, tears popping to the corners of his eyes, like maybe he has never quite laughed so hard in his life and isn’t sure how to contain it. Then Richie sings some more, trying not to think about the lyrics, the song he’s chosen to sing to, trying not to read too much into how much he loves shouting the lyrics _I want my honey, they think they know what we're going through, they don't know nothing_ , tries not to dwell on how _fond_ Eddie stares at him as he does, even when Richie sings the chorus.

He gives his voice a rest for the next song, letting the slower, softer voice roll out undisturbed from the speakers, sultry, _longing_ lyrics washing over them. He yawns wide, the heat making his drowsy, but not enough to doze off, to waste the rest of the trip. He rubs his cheek, hot from the sun, and recoils.

“Fuck, I think I’m starting to burn,” Richie grumbles, his cheek and neck how to the touch.

Eddie turns immediately. “Let me see?”

Richie wrenches his neck around, breath sticking in his throat when Eddie shifts the arm on the console out from under Richie’s, fingers raising to trail along his cheek, then bending so his knuckles drag close along the jaw. They linger longer than necessary, they don’t even need to _be there_ , like Eddie wouldn’t just be able to see the redness of his skin. His skin prickles under the touch. It’s the sunburn. It’s the tenderness of Eddie’s hand.

“We should reapply,” Eddie says, not dropping his hand.

“Reapply?”

This time, Eddie pulls his hand away, glaring. “Don’t tell me you’re not wearing sunscreen.”

“I’m not wearing sunscreen,” he says, grinning even though he knows it will make Eddie angry.

He _doesn’t_ know that Eddie is annoyed enough to press hard on the brakes, Richie’s torso straining against the seatbelt as they drop from 90mi/hr (too fast, too dangerous for how little they looked at the road), Eddie swerving the car onto the shoulder.

He shifts into park, leaving the engine on, and cranks the music higher, so Richie can barely hear him when he undoes his seatbelt and growls at Richie to _come on!_

Richie tumbles out of the car, more graceful this time than the last, landing feet-first and sparing his bandaged hands further harm. The windows still open, their music pours out of the Firebird on a patch of highway that looks nearly the same as every other patch. An imposing rock formation towers over the highway several yards ahead, a large and flowering cactus to their right, and Eddie swearing as he opens the trunk, pulling out a different bag this time.

Richie rounds the car, listening idly to the music and to Eddie, who is continuing to list the dangers of sun exposure, talking about moles, about skin cancer, about _wrinkles, Richie, do you want to look your age?_ The bag he has open is clearly his weekend bag, organized in packing cubes, a toiletry bag holding more toiletries than Richie thinks he _owns_ , let alone would bring travelling. He pulls out two different sunscreens, one in a smaller tube and one a large familiar brand with a bright yellow cap. Richie tries to peer into his things, poking at the packing cubes idly, and Eddie nearly zips his hand into the bag.

Before Richie can tease him about the packing—ask how he even has _time_ between driving to and from, with his job, with the obscenely good shape he’s in, to pack and unpack all the time, let alone squishing way too much stuff into packing cubes—Eddie starts to unbutton his shirt and Richie’s brain short-circuits.

He’s not normally _suave_ , exactly. He’s specialty is jokes, often crude, and heavy innuendo, or more often than not, waiting for someone else to start flirting, start talking, so he could pick up on the joke from there. That was where Richie flourished, in the exchange. There is no exchange in Eddie unbuttoning his well-fitting shirt with a deeply unsexy utilitarianism that still made heat coil low in Richie’s stomach.

Were he suave, he would say something. He just stares, watching the long, thin fingers work down the buttons, watching the shirt loosen around his muscles, seeing the white undershirt peeking out from under his clothes, as the speakers blasted the playlist Richie made for _them_ that Eddie understood. Eddie shrugs the shirt off his shoulders, careful not to wrinkle the fabric. The chastest striptease in history.

If Richie thought he looked good in the suit, he has no fucking clue what to do now that he’s wearing less clothing, as Eddie rebuttons the shirt (who the _fuck_ does that) and folds it carefully. Richie drinks in the sight of _skin_ , tan and smattered with more light freckles. He wants to spend hours connecting them, drawing tender lines with his fingers from the ones on his hands up to his neck, the ones on the visible slice of chest with a smattering of lighter hair. As he shifts, putting the shirt away in the trunk _and oh god is he staying like this?_ Richie’s eyes cling to the movement of muscles, his arms, his shoulders, down his back where it narrows into such a tiny little waist. He wants to put his hands there, to follow the line of Eddie’s sides until he finds his hipbones, and hold him. When he finally looks at Eddie’s eyes again, the man is staring at him, beaming, the larger tube of sunscreen in his hands.

“You’re going to have to get my back for me.”

“Okay,” Richie says dumbly. He wishes Stan were here to see it—him struck absolutely _speechless_ at the sight of Eddie’s body, mostly clothed, and his smile that stretches farther than the highway. He is also immensely glad Stan _isn’t_ here.

Eddie pops the cap on the sunscreen, squeezing too much into his palm and then squeezing _more_ , like there isn’t a truly absurd volume of sunscreen accumulating in his palm.

“Is there a line in your budget just for sunscreen? Like, you must go through a tube a week,” Richie says.

“I claim it as a business expense,” Eddie quips quickly, and Richie should be sad that he’ll never be as funny as this strange little man he met on the highway but instead he just throws his head back, laughing, knowing Eddie is following the line of his throat.

Eddie dollops the sunscreen in huge drops up his arms, over his shoulders, onto his chest, reaching around to dab some onto the part of his back he can’t quite reach. Richie stands there watching Eddie’s palms work over his body, rubbing firm circles until the sunscreen melts into his skin, then moving onto another section. He works from the back of his hands up his arms, skipping over his shoulders to rub the lotion into his chest, up his neck. He grins at Richie again, really more of a _resurgence_ because Richie doesn’t think it has gone away, thinks maybe he would dedicate his life to making sure it was always there.

“Be careful of your bandages.”

Richie’s cue. He steps close to Eddie and the air between them feels like it’s warping, pulling Richie close, too close, and he bumps against Eddie, making them both chuckle, before he stands behind him. He raises his right hand, hovering over Eddie’s shoulder for a moment, before touching him, just below the sunscreen, letting his fingers float over the skin there, over the freckles. Eddie lets out a _mmm_ , low in his throat, and Richie spreads the sunscreen across the shoulders. Eddie’s skin is so soft, taut, stretching over muscles that it’s truly unfair that he has, when he works as much as he does and drives between Vegas and Phoenix all the time and has a daughter _and_ somehow seems like he’s on one of those celebrity workout plans that Richie has spent his career avoiding. Richie tests his luck, spreading the sunscreen under the edges of the shirt, hungry to touch more, to see more, and Eddie lets him, making quiet, content noises and leaning back into his touch. Eddie’s head falls back against his shoulder when he touches his neck and Richie puts that into the ever-growing catalogue of things he _needs_ to do to Eddie Kaspbrak.

“Your turn,” Eddie says eventually, letting the pretense stretch far beyond when the sunscreen is absorbed into his skin.

Eddie’s skin smells like coconuts and banana laffy taffy and Richie wants to bite down into it, lick as much fucking sunscreen as he needs to just to taste Eddie’s skin. Richie gives his shoulder a squeeze, before stepping away, lightheaded. He raises his hands automatically, preparing to accept more sunscreen than he thinks is strictly necessary for proper sun protection, and Eddie just stares at them.

“You don’t want help?” 

“Uh,” Richie says, mouth dry.

“I mean,” Eddie says, voice faux-demure. Richie thinks he may die today and there’s no better way to go, “I don’t want to have to redo your bandages. I’ll take care of you.”

His legs feel like jelly and he thinks maybe the heat has melted his brain, that it is pouring out his ears, because he didn’t even think about Eddie touching him and suddenly he’s squirting sunscreen into his palms again and stepping too close to Richie, looking up at him with devilish smile. _I’ll take care of you_.

And then, as if ignorant of the sheer earth-shattering force of that simple sentiment, Eddie is dotting the sunscreen across Richie’s body, on his wrists, his forearms, up to the edge of his sleeves, jumping to his neck, a spot on the front and under his hairline at the back, then a mirroring trail down his other arm.

Then Eddie drops to his knees on the hot concrete of Route 93 like his clothes don’t cost more than Richie’s car and Richie _pants_ at the sight of him there. Eddie lets out a sound that’s nearly a giggle, and proceeds undeterred, dotting sunscreen from Richie’s knees down to his ankles. Richie closes his eyes and tries to think of anything but Eddie down on his knees in the middle of the desert as the heady tunes of the playlist he made pour out from the car. He should have known he would be his own downfall.

“Hairy,” Eddie says, as he starts to rub the sunscreen in, those _hands_ rubbing firm circles against his knee, around the back.

“Sorry.”

“I’m a fan,” Eddie says, his voice so steady even when he’s disassembling Richie at an atomic level.

“Well, there’s more where that came from,” Richie says nervously as Eddie’s hands move down to his calf. 

“Good to hear.”

He’s doing a terrible job of calming himself down, especially when he opens his eyes again, watching Eddie work his hands down his legs, now at his ankles, head too close to Richie’s groin. He can’t stop his brain from racing: Eddie lifting his head to kiss him through his shorts, Eddie up on his knees kissing above the waistline, tonguing his stomach, following the hair there as far as he wants to go, _Eddie Eddie Eddie_. Blood rushes south faster than Richie can think about it and he swells in his shorts just as Eddie stands up again.

Eddie makes quick work of his arms, grip firm, rough hands, touching every bare inch of Richie’s skin. Richie tries to think of something else, something that’s not Eddie’s hands or Eddie’s arms or any part of Eddie, really, but Eddie keeps his gaze the entire time, eyes only darting away when he moves his hands to a new section. He does Richie’s neck next, kneading the sunscreen just below his jawline, down to the edge of the loose-necked crew neck, around the back of his neck. Richie’s eyes flutter closed and the feeling and Eddie just laughs breathlessly, before rubbing the sunscreen into his other arm.

When Eddie steps away, he reaches for the other tube, the smaller one, a brand Richie doesn’t recognize. Eddie sees him staring.

“You can’t use the same sunscreen on your face as your body.”

“No, sure, of course.”

“Dude, seriously, it will clog the fuck out of your pores,” Eddie says, crossly, squeezing _way more than a dime-sized amount_ in between his fingers.

“Do you want to hear about my skincare routine?”

“I highly doubt you have anything coordinated enough to call a routine,” Eddie snipes.

He steps closer to Richie, faces inches apart, eyes schooled, focussed, as he dabs the sunscreen across Richie’s forehead, the apples of his cheeks, the tip of his nose, along his jaw. Richie has a retort on the tip of his tongue that fizzles away at the touch, gentle this time, the pads of his fingertips just swiping across his jawline.

Up close like this, Richie can see that the freckles continue up Eddie’s neck onto his face, little pale speckles across his cheeks, settled atop of a light flush. He stares at them until Eddie reaches behind his ears, tugging the glasses off his face. He goes to push them to the top of his head, but seems to change his mind, pulling them all the way off. The world is a blur around the edges except for Eddie’s face, freckles now most difficult to discern, smoothed into the rest of his tanned skin, but still achingly beautiful, even more so as the world fades into a halo around him.

Eddie drops the glasses onto his own face, pushing them up his nose. Richie thinks if he liked him any more his chest would explode. His wide brown eyes are even larger under his thick lens. They are far too big for his face, slipping down his nose, making him look goofy, but Eddie just laughs.

“Your eyesight is _terrible_ ,” he says, but leaves them on as he rubs the sunscreen into Richie’s skin.

“Legally Blind, Elle Woods-style,” he mumbles when Eddie’s fingers slide along his jaw, earning him another laugh even though it’s absurd.

Standing there in the Arizona heat—skin sticky from sunscreen, their skin smelling like the beach, like Los Angeles (would Eddie like LA?), Richie's glasses sliding down Eddie’s nose, Eddie sticking his tongue out from between his teeth as he massages sunscreen into Richie’s forehead—Richie could kiss him. He has wanted to since he saw him. He spends every minute thinking more and more that he could stay on the highway for the rest of his life, driving the same route, kissing Eddie for hours, for days.

Richie isn’t disappointed when Eddie steps away, when he slides the glasses back onto Richie’s face and bitches about how he strained his eyes, when he quickly spreads sunscreen over his own face. He could kiss him anytime. They have time, maybe more time than Richie can conceptualize. He can wait.

He reaches over when Eddie turns to put the sunscreen away, a light touch on his jaw, and Eddie turns his head immediately, meeting his eyes. The music pouring from the car narrates the moment: _Seems like yesterday your eyes craved this way, into my soul you stared and bored down every fear_. He doesn’t kiss him, but he touches his jaw, his cheek, rubbing away the remnants of sunscreen he missed. Eddie tilts his face into Richie’s hand as he does.

He isn’t sure how long they stand there, two bodies as close as possible without really touching except where Richie’s hand cradles his face and Eddie leans into the touch, lids low, as music pours out of their car, as occasional cars pass by, probably staring, not distracting enough to pull Richie away from the longest moments of his life.

* * *

Eddie’s on a work call, which he answered, apologizing to Richie hurriedly, like he could possibly inconvenience the man who he scraped off the side of the road, covered in blood and too close to heat exhaustion. Eddie paused the playlist so the only sound in the car is his voice and the occasional tiny mutterings of the other end of the line.

Eddie talks differently on the phone, but it is so far from a customer service voice. No one could possibly characterize it as nice. He’s on the phone with someone from his office, some poor fellow named Kyle, and is talking with a businesslike efficiency that Richie finds distracting, sexy, even though he may as well be reading out from the phone book. His tone is less varied, his voice an iota slower than it is when he speaks to Richie, but arms still flailing when he talks like his coworker could see him. Richie lets his voice settle into a low drone in the background of the drive.

He opens his messages, finally reading the increasingly panicked texts from Stan, which culminated in IF YOU DON’T PICK UP THE PHONE WHEN I CALL YOU I WILL FILE A MISSING PERSONS’ REPORT, and Richie did not realize it was more than an hour between when he texted Stan and when Stan phoned, that he and Eddie stood outside together, looking first at Holly, then at his hands, for so long.

 **Richie:** still alive

 **Stan:** Through no effort of your own.

 **Richie:** no effort has worked out well for me so far

 **Stan:** That’s a great attitude.

 **Stan:** Kaspbrak not showing any murderous intentions yet?

 **Richie:** no but I popped a boner when he rubbed sunscreen on my legs

 **Stan:** Wonderful.

He smiles at Stan’s response, but switches chats to text his manager, Ali, who was expecting him to arrive by 7PM at the latest, but it was _already_ nearly 6:30. He fires off a few short texts to her.

Ali is the best manager he has ever had, sympathetic in a way Steve never was but never coddling. She trusts Richie, so when he says he’s running late, she just tells him she’ll pick the outfit and make sure it is something he would actually wear. He trusts her not to stuff him into a monkey suit.

He hasn’t thought about his show much on the drive, which is a blissful feeling in itself. He doesn’t remember the last time he felt so relaxed this close to getting on stage. It doesn’t matter how many times he performs, at however many venues, in front of any number of people. He always finds himself an anxious mess, drenched in sweat before the lights even hit him, hands shaking until he gets a drink or two in him, stomach turning. Even this tour, which feels longer any stretch of Richie’s life (even high school, and isn’t _that_ telling), he still feels the jitters, the nausea that didn’t settle until fifteen minutes into a set, until he finally was convinced that his material was _funny_ and the people came here to see _him_. He feels like an imposter every moment on the stage.

He wants something new for Phoenix. He likes a little something fresh for each show, sometimes a new bit, sometimes an extension of a bit, sometimes audience interaction although it isn’t his favourite. He thinks back to his earliest days, when he started with his own material, how scared he was of the hecklers only to find that _really Richie, people only heckle you if you’re shit_.

He pops open Eddie’s glove compartment, knowing that he _must_ have a pen and paper somewhere. He isn’t disappointed. Amazed would be more accurate. He finds a pencil case, sleek and probably too expensive for something to hold pens in the glovebox of a car, and a mini Moleskine notebook inside, because of course Eddie couldn’t buy something from the dollar store.

“Not your diary, right?” Richie asks and Eddie raises his hand from the wheel and flips him off until they start drifting onto the shoulder, still yapping into the phone.

He opens the notebook. The page in front of him is blank, but the notebook is not unused. Several pages, almost a quarter of the book, appear to have been meticulously torn from the spine. Richie’s chest tightens a little thinking about what those pages said, whether they were grocery lists, reminders, notes from work calls, accident information, angrily scrawled directions for strangers who over-relied on Google Maps. He thinks most likely the notebook is used for leaving passive-aggressive notes on windshields of unsuspecting cars, notes like _sorry looks like someone peeled off your NRA bumper sticker you fucking tool_ and _wear your fucking glasses next time your park_ and _I hope you don’t fuck like you park or you’ll never get it in_.

He opens the pencil case, revealing several pens of different colours—red, blue, black, even green ink, and Richie wonders if Eddie adds rude little drawings to his car notes. Green feels like a particularly comic colour, so he chooses one of those and settles back in his seat with the notebook, twirling the pen in his fingers and listening to Eddie talk for a moment.

“—no, Kyle, you’re not listening to me, we don’t _want_ to get an injunction. Don’t shoot first and ask questions later. Why would we do that? Why? Why turn this perfectly amicable litigation into a fucking shitshow that we can’t control? No, either get on the phone and ask nicely or send me their contact information and I’ll do it myself.”

He cannot quite imagine Eddie asking for anything _nicely_ , but would really love for Kyle to be inadequate for the task so he could hear the attempt. Unfortunately, it sounds like Kyle will be handling the niceties.

Richie stares out at the long road ahead of him as Eddie wraps up the call. The sun is lower and lower in the sky, drenching the highway in a liquid amber shroud, warming his cheek but no longer burning, except for where he can still feel the ghost of Eddie’s fingers on his jaw, on his neck.

He puts pen to paper, writing down small segments of his day, about his knight in an expensive suit riding in with his _Firebird_ to save Richie from the sweltering heat of the desert only to tell him he doesn’t have AC. His _lawyer-qua-mechanic-qua-nurse_. He wonders how far to push it, how to approach it. Is it a comedy or a love story? He weaves together reality and fantasy although he isn’t sure where one ends and one begins. Was it real when Eddie leaned on the hood of his car? Did time really warp when the music started, when he watched Eddie listen intently? How long had they been on this road and how long would they be here?

He scribbles out a section that has become completely inappropriate for a comedy set and altogether too sappy for Richie to acknowledge having produced. He extracts some of the good bits, some of the things he can make funny. He doesn’t think Eddie will mind if he talks about him, if he mentions how he complains about everything there is to complain about, how he always has an opinion, how apparently Uber arbitrations are in the Netherlands and Canadians are mad about it, or something along those lines.

“What are you doing?” Eddie asks, after snapping a harsh _thanks_ , no goodbye, into his phone. He wastes no time in restarting the playlist, skipping back to the beginning of the song they were on, lyrics repeating _I want you by my side so I never feel alone again_.

“Working on a bit.”

“Right now?” Eddie asks, leaning over to sneak a peek.

Richie doesn’t attempt to hide it, despite the somewhat unhinged parts he crossed out, because he lives in assurance that Eddie couldn’t read his writing if he tried. He feels briefly vindicated when Eddie tilts his head sideways, squinting. They may as well be hieroglyphics.

“Does that say _I was hoping he would kidnap me_?”

Richie slams the notebook closed before Eddie can attempt to decipher any of the notes that veered away from funny and dangerously close to sentimentality. Eddie just laughs, leaning away, mumbling _fine, keep your secrets_ as he did.

“Are you also a handwriting specialist?” Richie asks, appalled. Stan can’t read his writing and they copied each other’s homework for years.

“You write like Gabby did when she was in kindergarten,” he snipes.

“Finally I am writing at my reading level!”

Eddie laughs again, a low, honeyed sound that slips down Richie’s spine. He reopens the notebook and looks down at the page, at the words he has scrawled out, at the parts he has salvaged. He tears the page out carefully, following the neat lines of the other torn pages, and tries again, scratching out a better version of the bit, finding its shape. Even as it becomes a little too honest, a little too raw, he thinks it works. He finally pulls his head up, satisfied with the words on the page, rolling them over his tongue without speaking aloud. 

He has spent too much of the drive staring at Eddie—at the long column of his neck, the harsh lines of his jaw, the curl of his hair around his ears, the arms now on full display, how he never seems to keep both hands on the wheel if he can help it, how even the one hand on the wheel hangs so loose. The view is great.

The view outside cannot compare, but it comes close. Only hours ago Richie cursed the endless stretch of desert but now he hopes, prays, that it _is_ endless, that there’s no show at the end of the drive, just a chance to restart the playlist and live the trip again, or never let it end in the first place.

The road is so flat he can see far down the road. The central divider between the north and south lanes is sparse, but just off the shoulder the ground rises, lined with hearty green shrubbery, withstanding the heat of the sun, the dry ground beneath it. In the distance, further from the highway, he can see sparse bushes, towering palm trees, cacti, and _mountains_ , beautiful mountains cutting across the horizon. They pass little highway offshoots, dirt roads leading to cities with names he forgets as quickly as he sees them, some having no sign at all. Power lines run parallel to the road and Richie finds himself watching the rise and fall of the lines against the cloudless sky.

They pass a gas station, American and Arizona flags waving high above them, packed with cars using it as a rest stop. There are more cars on the road now, as they crawl closer to Phoenix, but it’s late enough in the day that most roadtrippers have found somewhere to stop, and most of their company is long haul truckers, which Eddie mercilessly passes, cruising faster than Richie has ever driven in his _life_ like it’s nothing, even as the engine roars. Route 93 melts into Route 60 but nothing else changes.

“I know it’s just desert but fuck if this drive isn’t beautiful,” Richie says.

Eddie moves his head, eyes flickering from the road, to the sky, to the endless dirt on either side of them, a cursory glance.

“I used to think so too. Driving it twice a week killed the romance for me,” he admits, even as his eyes linger on the horizon.

“That’s a shame,” Richie says, words spilling from his lips. “Do you think we could revive it?”

Eddie doesn’t take his eyes off the road this time, but his face splits open with another smile. For someone with such sad eyes, Eddie’s smile could light the world on fire. Lips parted, all teeth, tongue darting out to lick his lips, always on the verge of laughing, and Richie wants to _chase_ that, to pull the laugh from his chest, to keep the smile there until his cheeks hurt and all that’s left is the twinkle in those eyes.

“We may have already,” he says, and Richie thinks he’s right.

* * *

They are close to the city now, driving along another highway, route 74, a road Eddie tells him is called _Carefree Highway_ , as if that isn’t the most fitting thing in the world. Their playlist ended, leaving them for a moment in an eerie silence. It would have been the perfect length if not for the sunscreen stop. Richie would trade _nothing_ for the sunscreen, although he can’t help but be disappointed the playlist did not carry them through to the end.

Before Richie could say anything, could pick a new playlist or find a podcast episode, Eddie plucks his phone from his hands, opens their playlist, and restarts it from the beginning. He hands the phone back and their fingertips brush. Richie has never met someone who’s lightest touches at once grounded him and made the world around them hazy, out of focus. He could see the road, he could see the lights, he could see Eddie. Beyond that, the unknown. A sensation so powerful that Richie _must_ not be alone, Eddie _must_ feel it. A bone-deep longing for his touch, for his gaze.

Eddie is rambling on about how Richie is lucky to have been picked up by a driver who not only _wasn’t a murderer_ , but also knew Arizona, because otherwise Richie would have ended up in Phoenix and “not Scottsdale, where the resort _actually_ is”. Eddie just gets mad when he points out that most people use Google Maps, and then he starts bitching about reliance on GPSs again and how they won’t always get you out of trouble.

“Have you always lived in Phoenix? Or Vegas?”

“Fuck, no. Lived in New York until five years ago,” Eddie says.

“Wow, hotshot lawyer in the Big Apple,” Richie teases, and Eddie rolls his eyes. “Why move to the desert? Wanted to bring out your freckles?”

“Definitely not that. I don’t like them.”

Richie gasps. “Eds, how could you? I want to smooch each and every one of them.”

“Do you now?” Eddie asks, eyes flickering to him, gaze hungry. Richie swallows. “I suppose they aren’t so bad then.”

“There you go,” Richie says, taking a long gulp from the second water bottle this trip.

“My mother was a piece of shit,” Eddie says, looking back at the road. It’s not where Richie thought the story would start. “Controlling, manipulative, the whole lot. She was sick, COPD, Emphysema, a laundry list of other things, and there was a speciality centre in Arizona. Myra and I finally packed her up and shipped her down here for treatment, and I only had to come down every few years.”

He pauses, biting his tongue, and glances at Richie. He stares back. Whatever Eddie’s looking for, he must find, because his eyes settle back on the road and the rising city skyline.

“Then she starts to die. Myra and her collude, as they always did, and so we moved, while Gabby was still young. Two, at the time. I refused to move to Phoenix, to be in the same city. My office offered a transfer to Vegas, so we moved there as an unhappy medium.

“Unhappy?” Richie asks, not trying to interrupt, only to signal that he is _listening_ and he wants to know.

“Myra _hated_ Vegas. Full of drunks and deviants, she said. But it was far enough away that we could visit my mom without being too close. My mom died, four years ago now, and we stayed in Vegas until the divorce,” Eddie says, voice level, a practiced calmness, except for the smile over _drunks and deviants_.

“When was the divorce?”

“Two years ago last month. I knew if I asked for a divorce, Myra would insist on moving to Phoenix. I wanted to ask before Gabby started school.”

Richie considers this, considers how hard it must have been to get to a point where saying these words, where talking about it, doesn’t hurt, or hurts less if anything ever stops hurting.

“Late gay awakening?” he asks.

“No, I already knew. I think she did too, somewhere in there.”

“What was the last straw?” Richie tries instead.

Eddie shrugs. “No real straw. More like a slow drag. Lots of therapy. Some good friends.”

Richie smiles, familiar territory. “Lots of therapy and good friends are really all you need.”

Eddie laughs at this, breaking the tension that settled over the car, the thick and oppressive air that accompanies declarations like this, the digging up of traumas. “That they are.”

Eddie clears his throat. “Anyway, she moved Gabby to Phoenix. I didn’t want to fight. I just bought a place down here, a little two bedroom close to Gabby’s school. Work is good with telecommuting and I’m still in the office three and a half days per week.”

Richie mulls over the story for a few long minutes, the silence comfortable as it stretches between them, the playlist continuing through its second round. Eddie has a sharp ear, and remembers the songs, humming along with the sound and mumbling out the lyrics he finds memorable.

“That’s pretty fucking badass,” Richie decides. Eddie stops, mid-lyric, to stare at him.

“There’s literally nothing less badass than a 40 year old gay guy finally divorcing the wife he’s hated for ten years,” he deadpans, then waits, expecting Richie to laugh. He doesn’t.

“Don’t sell yourself short. I’m not unfamiliar with—” _abusive_ , he almost says, but knows the heavy weight the word carries, the reticence to use it. “Toxic relationships. Easy to get into, hard to leave.”

Eddie’s face softens, his lips parting, blinking rapidly. His eyes shine for a moment, and Richie understands, understands how it feels to be lost in this moment, sun nearly set, city lights illuminating their path, and how it feels when someone else says the right thing. Eddie’s hand reaches for him, and Richie drops his phone down onto the seat next to him, reaching back, slow, careful, waiting for what Eddie wants. Eddie stares down at his hand and laces their fingers together, setting their wrists back down on the centre console. Richie’s eyes prick with tears and he shakes himself.

“Yeah. It was,” Eddie says, staring down at their linked hands, glancing briefly at the road, and then settling on Richie again. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. Only two other people know all this. I almost feel—”

“Like we’ve met before,” Richie finishes.

Eddie lets out a harsh breath and nods. “Yeah. But we haven’t. I would remember.”

What does it mean to have met someone? Does it have to be here, and now? They retraced their histories together in this car, Eddie asking him questions no one else ever really asked him, let alone someone he just met, like _do you actually like LA? (Yes, god, yes.) Did you always like making people laugh? (I never wanted to do anything else.) Are you close with your parents? (Now more than ever)._ Eddie made him laugh like Richie had never laughed before. He couldn’t anticipate a single thing Eddie would say and yet nothing ever quite surprised him, nothing ever felt foreign on his lips.

 _I would remember_ , Eddie says, and maybe they would have or maybe they wouldn’t, but at least they had now, at least they met today. Richie should have taken Holly in before he left, but he didn’t. He had opportunity after opportunity to have her fixed and he pushed her. He left late today, this afternoon, when he would usually give himself more time to travel, time to stop by the hotel room first, to destress, to shower, to throw back some drinks. He woke groggily, late, past checkout time this morning and rushed out of the city. He nearly drove down yesterday, but took the extra day to sleep, to spend a lonely weekday night in Vegas in his room instead of enjoying the city.

Eddie left work early today. He normally drives down later in the evening, after dinner, cruising along the _very_ empty highway as the sun sets and the darkness settles over the desert, temperatures cooling from stifling to bearable. Today he left early, tired from a long week of work and itching to crawl into bed as early as possible. He doesn’t usually pull over for strangers, he says, not now that everyone has smartphones, but Richie looked so miserable, so still, leaning on his trunk. He supposes he was. The two of them should never have been on the same road at the same time. But they were.

“Do you believe in destiny, Eddie?”

He doesn’t take his eyes off the road this time, but a sly smile crawls across his lips. “I didn’t.”

* * *

The world is so quiet when Eddie turns the engine off. Richie doesn’t remember it being so quiet. He doesn’t remember the sounds before his looping playlist or the low growl of the Firebird’s engine. He doesn’t remember a voice other than Eddie’s, which shifted from tender to wild to angry, each change of tone separated only by heartbeats. A moment earlier, Eddie was swearing, screaming out his rolled-down windows in a truly impressive road rage in a permitless, open-carry state like he didn’t fear death or, possibly, anything. The silence of the car cooling off is incomparable.

Richie looks out from the car, between the columns of the parkade where the resort glows blue and green. They are earlier than he thought, still 45 minutes to the show, no doubt due to Eddie’s complete disregard for speed limits or traffic rules, living instead by the mantra _may the best man win_. Eddie could have dropped him off in front, accepted money for gas, taken Richie’s number, and drove off. 

“Look—” Richie starts.

“Hey—” Eddie says, at the same time.

They both stop, laughing.

“You first,” Richie says. Eddie shakes his head and points at Richie. “Do you—I mean—no pressure—do you want to stay? For the show?”

Richie knows the answer, he knows why they are in the parkade, why the engine is off, why they both undid their seatbelts, why their hands are still tangled together and why Eddie laughs, high and light, at his question.

“I was going to ask if there were still tickets.”

Richie laughs breathlessly. “I have some spares. If you want to, you could watch from offstage?” he asks, suddenly giddy.

“Gotta have a good view of this famous comedian.”

Neither of them start it. It’s more like a pull, like the universe’s gentle hand guiding two souls together. Richie lets go of his hand to plant it on the console, leaning over the divide, Eddie surging up to do the same. Their lips slide together with the barest brush, not teeth clacking and rough but a tender glide, of nipping lips. The kiss is slow, languid, not a desperate, clinging kiss but an eventuality, like the sunrise or the tides. Like they were always going to be here, here being a state, a condition, not a place or time, that _here_ was a combination of luck and possibility.

Eddie’s hand wraps around the back of his neck, skin still sticky from sunscreen and running hot from the long drive in the heat. He pulls them closer together, and their mouths fall open. Richie sucks Eddie’s bottom lip into his mouth until he’s moaning, quiet, breathy, until he pulls their mouths together and slips his tongue past Richie’s teeth. Even as the kiss deepens, as Richie’s shorts tighten, as their hands rove from head to shoulders to waist, the kiss is unhurried, an affectionate, _filthy_ slide of tongues and spit, like they have all the time in the world.

When they pull apart, after minutes, hours, weeks, years, Eddie presses their foreheads together, mouths only a breath apart, noses bumping, and they stay there for another few minutes, hours, weeks, years.

* * *

Eddie follows him inside after pulling his button down back on, standing close, hands brushing as they walk. Richie’s manager is waiting out front and ushers them inside, muttering to Richie about hair and makeup and how they _just_ have enough time to make sure he looks a little less sweaty out there. When he asks Ali if Eddie can stay, if he can watch from the side of the stage, she says there is a seat near the front available if he prefers. Eddie chooses the side stage.

He follows, less close but by his side, as Ali pushes him between dressing rooms, first to have someone cluck over his curls, limp from the heat and the sweat, to make him wash and powder his face like he wouldn’t be a sweaty mess by the time he got on stage anyway, then finally into wardrobe where Ali put him into a well-fitting plain black t-shirt. Eddie leans against the wall, quiet for once, watching as Richie changes shirts, eyes following the lines of his arms when he pulls his band shirt over his head, lingering along his chest, down to his stomach, eyes greedily following the line of hair below his navel. He takes his time pulling on the new shirt. Once he does, Ali slips a patterned button-down—bright green palms leaves and pink hibiscus—up his shoulders. She throws a pair of jeans at him, black, and leaves the room, not looking twice at Eddie.

“Can’t wait to get a look at my ass, Eds?” he says, with an exaggerated wiggle of his hips.

“Not my name,” he says, but he doesn’t move his eyes from Richie, something dark, _wanting_ in his eyes.

There’s nothing particularly sensual about how he ends up removing his shorts, dropping them too quickly, stumbling when he tries to step out of them, catching on his shoes. He makes a show of leaning down to pluck at his laces, Eddie making an exasperated sound at the sight of his boxer briefs.

“Pizza pattern? Really?”

“Yeah? Because you want a pizza this ass?”

Eddie snorts, but he doesn’t look away, following the long line of his legs, the curve of his ass, lingering on his thighs, down his calves, and then following back up his body. Richie almost shivers under his gaze. He pulls the jeans on, hopping into them and leaning back against the dressing room counter when he stumbles. They fit well, a little tight, slim, and Eddie stares at his legs again. He steps into clean black sneakers, not covered in desert dust.

Ali slips back into the room just as he finishes with the laces on the second shoe, balancing three drinks in her hands. She walks to Eddie first, and he thanks her as he plucks the most precarious one from her hands. She gives the second to Richie and keeps the third for herself. She waves Eddie over, glass of amber liquid swirling, aloft. Eddie crosses the space between them and scowls a little as he folds down the collar of Richie’s shirt, flattens the wrinkles with his palms pressed against his chest, his stomach, tugging at the hem of his shirt until it lays flat. Ali raises her eyebrows but says nothing, clinking their glasses together and throwing back her drink, the two of them mirroring her.

It’s five minutes to show, and Ali shuttles them both to the side stage, hands on their backs like a parent trying to usher unruly kids through a grocery store. She reminds him of his cue, the same cue as the last seven cities, the same timing, the same everything, but nothing quite feels the same. It’s no MSG but it’s a big venue, sitting at 90% capacity. Instead of the telltale churn of his stomach, Richie feels strangely at ease, the whiskey settling in his stomach and the memory of Eddie’s lips on his. Ali leaves them be, telling him to check in with her and the reps after the show, like she always does.

The low rumble of the audience, settling into their seats, pours across the stage. It sounds like a good crowd. He’s never performed in Phoenix before ( _Scottsdale_ , he can almost hear Eddie say, crossly) and he didn’t know what to expect, but that capacity at a venue this size is _good_ , is amazing, and sometimes Richie thinks that maybe this is what he was meant to do.

“How many of your jokes are about me?” Eddie asks, breaking him from his thoughts.

“Just the new ones. Rest assured that my entire next special will be based on that car ride,” Richie says. He’s not certain he is joking.

Eddie reaches up to flatten his collar again. “Doesn’t that just mean that I’m funny and you’re just a leech?”

“Oh honey there is no doubt about who the funny one in this relationship is,” Richie says, even as his stomach clenches a little at using the word.

Eddie’s returning smile is self-assured, _of course_ , and his hands slip into the curls at the nape at Richie’s neck to pull him down into a kiss, open-mouthed from the start, licking into Richie’s mouth like _he’s_ the one who needs this, like Richie hasn’t spent every second since their lips parted waiting for a quiet moment to kiss him again. Richie slides his hands down Eddie’s sides, resting his fingers on his hipbones, pulling him close enough that their chests bump and he has to twist his neck down. Eddie laughs, right against his tongue, and curls his fingers tighter, firmer into his hair, pulling at the strands until Richie is panting into his mouth, growing hard where their bodies are pressed together.

Richie doesn’t hear the cue, but Eddie must, because he pulls away, lips slick, swollen, pupils wide, and places a firm hand on Richie’s chest when he tries to chase his lips. His hands shift to Richie’s arms to spin him, then a single hand on his back shoves him towards the stage. Richie’s feet take him the rest of the way onto the stage, announcer saying his name, lights bright, applause harsh and resounding.

He should walk forward, should face the audience as he steps onto the stage, but he looks back over his shoulder where Eddie stands, hands shoved into his pocket, a flush crawling over his freckled cheeks. Eddie’s eyes find his in an instant, two magnets pulled together. He has the audacity to _wink_ , like Richie’s heart could be any higher in his throat, and Richie only turns his face towards the stage when the lights start to heat his cheek.

He waves, lower bowl obscured by the lights, and his stomach should roll from the large audience, one of the largest on this leg of the tour, but he can feel Eddie’s lips on his, his hands in his hair, his eyes on the side of his face as he approaches the microphone. It grounds him. He repeats the first line of his new opening joke, not green-lit by anyone except Eddie’s loud, choppy laughter as they rolled into the city: _So my car broke down on the way here, right in the middle of the fucking desert._ He chants it in his brain until the applause dies down, the intro music cuts out, and he plucks the microphone off its stand. He does his intro, his thank yous, and the first words of his bit are right on his lips. He looks offstage at Eddie again, and he leans against the wall, hip cocked, eyes locked on Richie.

“Do you believe in love at first sight, Scottsdale?” he says instead, remembering the scribbled out notes he left in Eddie’s car, tucked into the notebook, where maybe he would find them the next time he left a rude note on someone’s windshield.

“Oh yeah, baby, we are starting _heavy_ today. Netflix has never heard this one and my manager is pissing herself somewhere in the building. Lots of skeptics in the room? Yeah, me too, but let me tell you about this sexy lawyer-qua-mechanic-qua-nurse who scraped me off the side of the desert today. I can say _qua_ now because I’m fucking a lawyer.”

And like that, Richie is off, talking about Eddie longer than he should, a meandering journey through some of the day’s highlights, focussing on Eddie’s in-car mini bar, his distaste for Uber and Google Maps, his casual recitation of his personal information like he frequently rescued hitchhikers and convinced their worried friends he wasn’t going to kill them. Most of the highlights, the real ones, Richie kept to himself—how his hands felt electric when Eddie wrapped bandages around them, the look in Eddie’s eyes when he talked about Gabby, how he sang along to songs he did not quite know, how he looked at Richie like he could see the universe in his eyes. Every so often he thinks he can hear Eddie’s laugh punctuating the sound of the crowd, a loud, harsh sound that gets dragged tooth and nail from his body, like he’s fighting to keep it contained. He chases that sound the whole show. 

* * *

His manager grabs him as soon as he steps off stage but he can only see Eddie—Eddie smiling, Eddie leaning against the wall, Eddie with his eyes boring into the side of Richie's skull for the whole show. Ali is all smiles, voice raised, whopping and leaping, pulling him into a hug even as Richie tries to insist he’s too warm, too sweaty, from the long day in the hot sun and the long night on the hot stage, but she smacks him on the back harder than anyone of her stature ought to be capable of, squeezing him tight around the midsection.

The backstage is warm, heady as the audience drains out of the venue, low rumblings making their way backstage. He starts to get dragged away, by Ali and the Netflix rep whose name Richie could never quite remember (or who, possibly, was different each time? He couldn’t be sure). He looks back, eyes catching on Eddie immediately, following close behind.

Such a show, such an opening, such a hard veer off-script ought to have sent him spiralling, ought to have eviscerated him, left him shivering and shaking until he could not breathe. Although not wedded to it, Richie was loyal to his script, to his plan, to the curated chaos. He has also never been one for firsts, _first move, first kiss, first confession_. Today is different. Neither of them kissed first: they simply came together. Richie thinks it impossible to classify where the first move or first confession came from—was it in the parkade, neither wanting to leave? Was it Eddie rubbing sunscreen onto his face, wearing his glasses? Was it getting into his car? Was it Eddie pulling over to help?

It could be as recent as Richie standing on stage, under the lights and the eyes of thousands of people, spinning their day into stories that made the room light up and Eddie’s laugh pour over the stage. Perhaps the first move, the first confession, was far before today, far before Holly’s fortuitous collapse, far before this morning, this trip. Far before their time, if there was such a place.

It has been so long since he _loved_ it, truly loved being up there, baring his soul to an audience. He cannot think of anything he would prefer to do, he knows he is good at it, but all work, even the most well-suited, can tire after a time. The adrenaline after a show—after the applause and the laughter that he breathes in, drinks down, eats up, consumes in any way he can—this adrenaline is familiar. More than that, Richie’s body thrums, blood pumps hard through his veins. Maybe it was the best performance of his career. Maybe it was the worst (although Ali’s reactions did not suggest such a cruel twist). Richie enjoyed it. He enjoyed saying what he was thinking, out loud, about someone, and saying that to the audience. He thinks maybe Eddie—loud, aggressive, all his emotions on his sleeve or twisted into his brow or in his hands waving through the air—made him a little brave.

Richie is beset with phone calls, first to Stan to apologize for once again for forgetting to call him, then his publicist, then his agent, then the boss of the Netflix rep whose name he cannot remember, then back with his publicist. Eddie finds an unoccupied chair in the dressing room and drops down into it, wordless, waiting.

The time backstage passes in a flurry of contracts that fly from the rep, to Ali, to his agent, his lawyer, and back to him before the deal is sealed, before this night in Scottsdale, Arizona is blocked in as his next special, as they talk about changing the name of the special from his tour name, to something inspired by the first fifteen minutes of the show, the new material, different iterations getting floated before he can so much as think about what that means.

Ali shunts him back closer to the main stage, to a room where he has _meet and greets_ , because for some absurd reason he sells VIP tickets and people buy them. For him it’s just another blur of handshakes, some hugs, some fist bumps, lots of small and successful attempts to make people laugh, some too-earnest fans that tell him how important it is to see someone like them doing something like this. Those ones always put Richie on the verge of tears, and today is no different. Worse, even, as every emotion feels sharper, clearer.

When Ali finally pulls him from the meet and greet it feels like hours have passed, but she insists it’s barely ten. She pushes two beers into his arms and he steals a cigarette, her favourite lighter, and a kiss from her before she twirls away to rejoin the reps and pushes him back towards the dressing room. She tells him that Eddie should stick around if he makes Richie’s comedy that much better.

He slips back into the dressing room, Eddie in the same position in the chair, rigid, spine straightened, head tilted down to his phone screen where he furiously types into the body of an email, face twisted, frowning, tongue darting between his lips and clenched between his teeth. Richie watches from the doorway for a moment. A second to breathe. A second to watch Eddie.

A _woosh_ chimes as he drops his phone down into his lap, and he startles when he looks up to see Richie leaning in the doorway. His furrowed brow eases.

“That was the one.”

It’s not a question, but Richie breathes out a “Y _es_.”

Eddie smiles and pulls himself from the chair, dropping his phone into his pocket and crossing the space between them. He steals one of the beers from Richie’s hands, clinking their bottles together and taking a long drink. He tilts his head back, baring his neck, Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows. Richie’s mouth waters. Eddie pulls the bottle away from his mouth, tongue chasing the liquid left on his lips. He smiles when he sees Richie watching.

“I need some air,” Richie says finally, not lying.

Eddie just nods. “Let’s go.”

They flag a staff member down to find out where they take their smoke breaks, just for a moment of quiet. From the second they start walking, Eddie slides next to him and laces their fingers together. The teenaged staffer is more than happy to walk them to the door, telling them the code to get back in and chattering away about Richie’s show, about it being the most fun she had on a shift in weeks. Richie struggles to take a compliment on the best of days, and with Eddie’s thumb stroking the back of his hand like it’s something precious, something treasured, Richie isn’t certain he manages a coherent syllable the rest of the walk.

The heat hits like a wall the moment they step outside. He nearly turns around but Eddie catches him and shakes his head. The air is hot, but still fresher than inside. The staff entrance is clean, for what is essentially an alleyway, only a few cigarette butts on the ground and no discernable litter. Richie leans against the wall from the door. Eddie lets go of his hand and stares at the wall for a few moments, biting his lip.

Richie lets out a soft laugh and pulls off the wall, shrugging off his outer shirt. Eddie’s eyes dart from the wall, following the line of Richie’s shoulders and down his arms. He stares at Richie’s proffered shirt for a moment, face twisted in confusion, before letting a smile creep back over his lips. He pulls the shirt on over his button-down, and leans against the wall next to Richie.

He swims in the shirt, making him look tiny (or, perhaps, Richie look behemoth next to him), the fabric hanging down to his thighs, the sleeves nearly at his elbows. It flutters freely around him in the light evening breeze. Hanging over his crispy white button-down it looks especially absurd. He takes a long drink from his beer, watching Eddie do the same, but this time in _his_ clothes, in something Richie wore, in something that probably smelled like him.

“So were you funny before you met me?” Eddie asks, hiding his grin behind the mouth of the bottle as he takes a long sip.

“Hey now! Most of that was scripted.”

“And yet the beginning was the funniest.”

“So you admit I was funny?” Richie asks. He reaches over to Eddie and dips his fingers into the pocket of his shirt, fishing out the cigarette and lighter from Ali.

“Maybe,” he says, watching Richie’s fingers twirl the cigarette. “You weren’t joking though.”

“Of course I was joking, it’s a stand-up show,” Richie says. “As if I believe in love at first sight.”

It’s the sort of joke he wishes Stan was around to tell him not to make. He can almost hear his voice in his head now, _comedy is not a substitute for sincerity_ , like he fucking knows everything and is always right. He knows he takes it too far sometimes. He doesn’t always know where to stop. He says things and people take them seriously and he doesn’t _mean_ to make a joke of everything, he just—

But then Eddie is laughing, full-body, folding his arms over his stomach. It’s the same sound he heard on the stage, the same sound that pulled him through the set, the sound he pursued relentlessly, wondering how he could improve each joke so the sound became less of a response and more of a narration, a soundtrack, something Richie could play over and over in his head, something he could memorize.

“Fuck off,” Eddie says eventually, eyes crinkling as he continues to laugh. Richie joins him, loud and discordant barks of laughter nearly melting into a harmony in the night’s air.

When their laughs die, the silence falls over them, a heavy blanket, warm, comforting. Their arms press together, bodies aligned against the wall of the venue, staring up at the stars. 

Richie pops the cigarette between his lips, ducking his head down and cupping one hand around the tip to light it. Eddie watches with a sort of mild interest, eyes hooded, bottle clutched loosely in his fingertips. Richie sucks a few breaths in until the tip flares, smoulders, and the smoke fills his lungs.

Eddie watches him as he takes long, slow drags from the cigarette, lungs straining. He doesn’t smoke cigarettes anymore as a rule, not like in high school when he and Patty smoked on school grounds (tobacco, weed, whatever they could get) out near the portables, while Stan judged them until Patty offered him a drag from hers, and he would always take it. Richie teased him mercilessly about only doing it for the _indirect kiss_. Stan couldn’t argue with him because he wasn’t wrong.

He pulls it away from his lips, blowing smoke rings into the thick evening air. Eddie’s eyes track each circle until the smoke dissipates. Richie offers him the cigarette.

“Bad habit,” Eddie says, voice low, almost hoarse.

“Only if you make a habit out of it.”

Eddie opens his mouth, brows furrowing again, but closes it instead of arguing, shaking his head instead. When Richie raises the cigarette back to his lips, Eddie’s fingers intercept, snatching it away just as the filter touches his bottom lip.

He was confused when Eddie watched him smoke. He never paid much thought to other people smoking. Back in high school it just made Patty look cool. She was the tall, pretty girl who got into fistfights with bullies and told the cool kids to fuck off, who gave Richie his first cigarette and thought he and Stan were the best people in the world. 

Watching Eddie smoke is nothing like high school. It’s unfair for someone to look so sexy in such an absurd outfit. But Richie’s eyes are fixed on his hands, white cuffs of his shirt riding up past his wrists and over his palm, cigarette held aloft between two fingers. He raises it to his mouth, almost a disinterested move, and places it between his lips. Richie almost expects him to cough, but he just breathes in, lashes fluttering over his cheek, letting his eyes fall shut. The drag is long, slow, and when Eddie pulls it away from his lips he holds the smoke for a moment.

After a moment, his mouth opens and releases the smoke, letting it pour slowly over his lips, curling up in thin tendrils and rising past his nose, his eyes, through the slight flop of his hair where it has come loose again at the front. He keeps his eyes closed the whole time, letting the smoke escape in ashen curls, cigarette only inches from his lips.

When he takes the second drag, he lets his head fall back against the wall of the building, and Richie wonders briefly how he can tolerate it, but the thought is snatched from his brain as Eddie exhales, throat working, smoke rising into the air again. Richie wants to press open-mouthed kisses along Eddie’s throat, right here, but cannot tear his eyes away from his lips, from the silvery smoke, from his lashes laying on his cheeks.

Eddie’s eyes slide open, slow, almost lazy, as the smoke from another drag leaves his lips. He looks at Richie without turning his head, neck still long and exposed, cigarette still slotted in a loose grip between his fingers.

“Come home with me?” he asks, like Richie could refuse, like he would ever _want_ to refuse.

They abandon the cigarette and their half-finished bottles, slipping back into the building long enough to grab Richie’s original clothes. Eddie steals his phone the moment they get back into his car, putting on the playlist on the drive to his place, windows down, volume cranked high, making steely eye-contact with neighbouring cars that stare at them. The same songs on the playlist sound different the second time through, as Eddie picks up the lyrics and sings, soft and low, the whole drive home.

* * *

All the urgency missing from their kisses and touches earlier boils over by the time they pull into Eddie’s driveway. His hand resting on Richie’s thigh for the entire drive, thumb rubbing circles into the fabric, creeping over his leg until his fingers meet the inseam, teasing higher and higher along his leg. He turns the engine off and pulls his hand away, Richie’s entire thigh burning where his palm was moments earlier.

They barely get the bags into the house and the aircon on before Eddie tosses his bag aside and pins Richie against the door. He drops his bag and the cooler, both hitting the ground too hard, and his hands fly down to Eddie’s hips again.

Hands on Richie’s neck, twisting into his hair, pulling his head down, Eddie kisses him with purpose, intention, licking his mouth open until Richie is panting against him, knees weak, arms slipping around his waist to pull him closer, chests pressed together.

They separate, both gasping for breath, and Richie tries to chase his lips. Eddie frowns. “Take off your shoes.”

“Really? Shoes? There’s nothing else you want me to take off?” Richie says, releasing Eddie from his grip and kneeling down to pluck at the crisp white laces.

“I want _everything_ off but the shoes stay here,” Eddie says, voice stern, pointing at the two-tiered shoe rack, rows of perfectly aligned shoes.

Eddie’s eyes are on his hands, watching him tug at the laces, place the shoes on the rack. Richie can feel his gaze, hair on the back of his neck raising. He drops both knees to the ground and looks back up at Eddie, face level with his midsection. His eyes narrow.

“We’re not doing this in my hallway,” he says, unconvincingly. “I need a shower. So do you.”

Richie leans closer, pressing his face where his fingers were a moment earlier, nuzzling against his hipbone. Eddie groans, head falling back. He laughs under his breath and ducks down to untie his shoes instead—black oxfords, still shiny under the powder of desert dust, thin black laces. Expensive, he’s certain, and he takes care to unknot the laces, grabbing Eddie’s ankle to tilt the shoes off one at a time.

“You _definitely_ need a shower if you’ve been touching my shoes,” Eddie says, but his voice is high, airy. Richie places the oxfords on the shoe rack, next to a similar-looking pair, before looking back up at Eddie.

“What’s wrong, baby? You don’t want me just the way I am?” he teases, leaning his head against Eddie’s thigh again.

“No,” he replies.

And yet his hands slide over Richie’s cheek, along his jaw, cupping his face. He can still smell the smoke on his fingers when they brush over his lips, his nose, to bury in his hair. Eddie’s blunt nails drag along his scalp and his mouth falls open with an embarrassing noise. Eddie repeats the motion, fingers twisting in his hair, drawing aimless patterns on his scalp, making Richie groan softly against him. He fists one of his hands tight in Richie’s hair, tugging him up to meet his eyes. Richie gasps at the feeling.

“I’m not fucking you until we shower.” The heat that has been coiling in his stomach since they left the venue (or, arguably, from the moment he saw him standing behind his car door) flares.

“We better shower then.”

With that Eddie releases his hair, hands slipping down to Richie’s forearms to pull him upright, standing again, laughing when Richie’s bad knee pops, when he stumbles forward into Eddie’s arms, mostly by accident. He just grips him tighter and rights him, before taking his hand and pulling him down the hallway.

If Richie had tried to guess what Eddie’s house looked like, he would have pictured something like this. It’s a sprawling single-storey house, new or newly remodeled, modern, clean—white walls lined with photos in perfect frames. Most of the photos are of Gabby, school pictures, vacation pictures, one of the pictures from his wallet. When they pass by the living room, a sleek neutral colour scheme (a grey-blue couch, large glass coffee table with iron legs curling like vines, tall bookshelves packed with fiction, non-fiction, children’s series), his eyes catch on photos of Eddie, all recent, with the same two people—a stunning dark-skinned man with clean facial hair and an equally stunning redhead, her hair in waves down to her shoulders. _Mike and Bev_ , he thinks, remembering the story Eddie told of his first vacation after his divorce, how they took him through Vegas like he had never really lived there, and Eddie learned that maybe he hadn’t.

“Stop rubbernecking, you can look at it later,” Eddie complains, pulling firmer at Richie’s arm.

“Rubbernecking? Dude, I’m sorry, I think you’re too old for me.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie says. “Shut the fuck up. I can’t believe I want to fuck you.”

“Yes you can.”

Eddie sighs. “Yes, I can.”

He opens his mouth to tease again as Edde tugs him through the door to his bedroom, then through to the ensuite, but then those hands are on him again, cornering him against the bathroom sink, hands slipping up under the tight t-shirt. Richie gasps as fingers graze over his stomach, but Eddie just pulls the shirt over his head, nearly knocking his glasses off.

Richie reaches up to straighten them but before he can, Eddie plucks them off his face, sitting them down on the counter. His hands dart to Richie’s jeans, tugging at the button. The urgency makes Richie’s skin prick with sweat, his breathing ragged.

“Can’t wait to get another look at my pizza underwear?”

“I can’t wait to hide them somewhere so I never have to see them again,” Eddie says.

Richie knew this, somewhere deep in his bones. An inevitability, really, that they would be here. That they would do this again. That _this_ —the energy crackling in the air not raw but channeled, shaped over the hours they spent together that felt like years—was longer than one lucky day. Hearing it still makes Richie’s heart stammer in his chest.

“If you wanted to keep my panties you only had to ask,” Richie says, squeezing the words out through his tightened throat and aching chest, Eddie devolving into reluctant laughter as he swats him across the stomach.

“It’s so unattractive when you talk,” Eddie groans, pulling down the fly of his jeans and shoving them down his legs until Richie is left in the offending boxers.

“Maybe objectively, but it works on you,” Richie accuses.

Eddie doesn’t reply, stepping back from Richie to undo the buttons of his shirt again. Richie thinks he should help, but Eddie’s fingers are deft, quick, expert, putting on the same buttoned shirts everyday and removing them every night, fingers trained in the exact pattern of pushing delicate, translucent buttons through neatly-stitched holes.

Instead, Richie leans back against the counter, drinking in the sight, hand falling to the front of his boxers. He has been half-hard all day, and he thickens in his shorts with only the lightest touch. Eddie’s eyes darken, throwing the shirt off almost haphazard onto the sink counter, pulling his carefully-tucked undershirt out from his pants and moving it over his head.

Richie whistles, low, eyes final filling in the picture, the lean muscle hidden under the expensive clothes. The freckles from his neck continue down his chest, over his pecs, a light smattering along his navel, the well-defined muscles there. 

“Jesus, Eds, where do you get off having a body like that?” 

“Hopefully on you.”

And Richie’s head spins. He follows Eddie’s hands, making quick work of the rest of his clothes, tugging down dark boxer-briefs and revealing the collection of freckles across his legs, up his thighs, and his pretty pink cock nestled in dark, curly hair.

“Oh, yeah, absolutely on me,” Richie hears himself say, and Eddie laughs, laughs, and tugs Richie’s boxers off, throwing them far into the other room like a symbol of his distaste. Eddie stares at his cock, fully hard, bobbing between them, almost a clinical, assessing look in his eyes.

“Get in,” he says suddenly, pointing at his shower, a sleek, modern rainfall shower with all-glass doors that shine like Eddie cleans them every day. Richie doesn’t need to be asked twice.

They stumble into the shower quickly after that, Eddie peeling off the bandages on his hands and promising to rewrap them, like Richie wouldn’t have just washed his hands and called it a day if Eddie hadn’t come along with a full first aid kit and wrapped him up better than a doctor would have.

Eddie showers too hot for Arizona summers and the water burns when it hits his skin, but Eddie doesn’t give him long to think about it. He pushes Richie against the wall, hair just damp enough that his curls are flush with water, fingers curling in it again and bringing their mouths together in hot, sloppy kisses. Kissing under the stream of the shower is a little like drowning, all sweat and spit and two bodies coming together too desperate to remember how to breathe. Richie thinks drowning isn’t that bad, if it is here, if it is with Eddie’s tongue licking his molars and his gorgeous body pressed flush against Richie, hard against his leg.

When Eddie pulls away, Richie’s head spins and he leans back against the wall to catch his breath, but Eddie just gives him a wicked smile before dropping to his knees, shimmying between Richie’s legs.

The water trickles down over Eddie’s head, flattening the loose curls sweat had coaxed into his hair, trailing down over his face, his lips, his chin. He looks up at Richie through lashes with droplets clinging to the ends. “Let me take care of you, baby.”

Richie doesn’t mean to audibly groan at those words, but his knees shake and his hands fly to the back of Eddie’s scalp, voice low and whiny. Eddie hasn’t even touched him, and Richie flushes, embarrassed. Eddie doesn’t laugh, doesn’t mock. He licks his lips.

“Are you going to be nice and loud for me?” Eddie asks, voice rough, and Richie bites back another groan.

“So it’s _not_ unsexy when I talk? I can talk the whole time if— _fuck_.”

Eddie doesn’t let him finish, wrapping his fingers around the base of Richie’s cock and taking the head in his mouth. Richie’s head hits the tile of the wall too hard and his fingers tighten in Eddie’s hair. Eddie sucks at the head of his cock, mouth hot, tonguing his slit. He bobs his head further down, taking a little more of Richie into his mouth, tongue swirling around the head.

His hips stutter, sliding further into Eddie’s mouth, a cursed apology slipping through his lips. Eddie’s free arm comes up to press across his hips, strong, forceful, pinning Richie to the tile. Eddie pulls off with a pop, looking up at Richie again, frowning a little. Richie looks down at him, cheeks flushed and warm.

“Let _me,_ sweetheart,” Eddie says, stern, husky, and if Richie thought being called baby was bad, nothing could have prepared him for the weak, breathy whine that sweetheart earns.

Eddie notices, of course. He leans closer to Richie, pressing kisses across Richie’s lower stomach, mumbling the word again and again, _sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart_. The moan it rips from Richie borders on a sob. Eddie pulls away just enough to suck the head of his cock back between his lips, this time taking him deeper. The water pours down over his face, his closed eyes, his lips wrapped around Richie’s cock, one hand working him at the base and the other sliding him down his throat, hot, wet, spit and water swirling together in a hot slide.

Eddie pulls almost all the way of, mouthing at the head, tongue laving underneath the head, and before Richie can finish his sentence ( _Eds honey please_ ) Eddie swallows him down until his nose is buried in the curls at the base of Richie’s cock, until Richie’s hands fall weak at his sides, fingertips sliding up the wall. Before Richie can process the feeling of Eddie’s throat, tight, clenching around him, Eddie starts moving, bobbing his head and sliding his mouth along his length. Eddie moans around his cock when it hits the back of his throat and Richie can’t stop himself.

“Eddie, fuck, please, your fucking mouth—” he swears, head lolling back when hums around him, before taking him deep again, nose hitting above Richie’s cock over and over, throat working around him each time.

He drops a hand between Richie’s legs, teasing up his thighs, mouth still wrapped around his cock. His calloused fingers tease upwards, tickling the soft skin there. His fingers slip over Richie’s balls and he rubs, gentle, careful, but firm, not stopping the slick, fast slide of Richie into his throat. He presses his fingers back further, nudging at his perineum, then further, pressing between his cheeks, finger teasing his rim.

“You’re fucking killing me, I can’t believe this,” Richie babbles, eyes rolling back in his head when Eddie massages his hole and sucks the head of his cock. “I want— _fuck_.”

Eddie pulls off his cock and blinks the water out of his eyes. He stares up at Richie from between his legs, eyes blissed out, cock hanging hard along his thighs, lips bright red and a little swollen, slight from the shower and spit.

“Tell me what you want, Rich,” his voice hoarse but like fresh honey to his ears.

“You. Inside me,” Richie gasps, voice soft, questioning. Eddie smiles from below him, standing abruptly and pressing their mouths together in a hot, messy kiss.

When he pulls away, he lets Richie chase his lips this time, letting him curl an arm around his waist to pin their bodies together. He lets Richie take control of the kiss for a moment, palms flat on his chest, fingers twisting into the dark, coarse hair there, rubbing his skin.

“Lather,” Eddie mumbles against his lips, and Richie doesn’t listen, not right away, keeping Eddie close and his tongue down his throat. The hands on his chest push him, firm, domineering, against the wall, breaking their kiss and making Richie’s heart race. Eddie repeats, voice stern, “ _Lather_.”

And then he slides the foggy door to the shower open and steps out, dripping on the bathmat, water droplets sluicing down his torso. He looks back over his shoulder and points his chin at the shower caddy, with something like eight different bottles of various liquids and creams. 

Eddie disappears out of the bathroom, trailing droplets of water after him. Richie pants, breaths short, almost wheezing, but he grabs a body wash and slicks his hands, lathering it across his torso first.

Eddie returns quickly, another bottle in his hands, and steps back under the water of the shower. Before Richie can peer over, Eddie’s hands are all over him again, working the soap into his skin, large suds sliding down across Richie’s arms, chest, stomach, legs.

In a flurry of hands and too much wasted body wash they clean the day off of themselves. The sweat, the burning of their skin, the sunscreen, the smell of smoke from their shared cigarette, the alcohol, everything melts away under Eddie’s tangerine-scented suds. Two bodies, sliding together, bubbles caught in the twists of their body hair, nestled around their cocks, behind their ears. It’s more intimate than anything they’ve done yet, their hands slipping over expanses of skin. When they’re both soapy, suds starting to slide off under the torrent of water, Eddie’s strong hands grab his arms, tight around his soap-slippery biceps, and turn him to face the wall.

A bottle pops open and before Richie can fully process that Eddie left the room to get lube so he could fuck him in the shower, Eddie uses his knee to push Richie’s legs apart. His slick fingers press between Richie’s cheeks until he spreads his legs further, face hot against the cool tile and panting, a trail of fog creeping up the tiles.

“You look so fucking good like this, sweetheart,” Eddie says. Richie whines, loud, words falling out of his mouth as half-sounds when Eddie rubs slick fingers against his hole, prodding gently. “You like that? _Sweetheart_?”

Richie whines again, too embarrassed to say it aloud, too turned on to ask _at all_ , let alone nicely, so he just spreads his legs further and arches back against Eddie. He must like the answer he gets because he places a kiss to the back of Richie’s neck that makes him shudder, and then he presses one digit into him in a slow, easy slide.

Richie loses track of the world then, head still against the tile. Eddie mumbles, talking _constantly_ , as he presses into Richie, working him too slowly like he knows it’ll drive him crazy. An almost leisurely slide of one long, calloused finger pressing into him. He slides another finger past his rim and Richie arches back against him, body shuddering. Eddie growls a low sound and leans up to press his lips to the base of Richie’s neck. Water pours over both of their bodies, an extra sensation threatening to push Richie over the edge, but Eddie’s mouth follows the droplets, from his neck, his shoulders, his back. Before he can open his mouth to beg for more, keening back against Eddie, nearly fucking himself on his fingers, Eddie presses a third into him and Richie’s head falls backwards. 

Eddie laughs, lips still pressing into the nape of his neck, and says right against the skin, “You’re so good, aren’t you?”

He tries to answer but can’t find the words, maybe for the first time in his life. Instead he bucks back against the fingers, buried in him, and Eddie places a hand on his back to keep him against the wall. Richie’s cock bobs between his legs, aching, hard, and he whines as it rubs against the wall, still slick from the expensive, sudsy soap Eddie uses.

Then Eddie’s wrist shifts, a better angle, and he stops going slow. He presses into Richie, firm, fast, fucking him hard with his fingers, brushing against his prostate until Richie’s vision blurs. He reaches around between their bodies and the tile to wrap a hand around Richie, thumbing at the head of his cock, using the soap to start a slick slide in time with his fingers. It’s so much, too much, and all Richie can focus on is Eddie’s soft whispers _good, sweetheart, fuck, look at you_ , the patter of the water against the floor and his skin, the sounds falling from his own mouths that sounds like pleas, or prayers, or both.

“Eds, if you don’t fuck me now I’m going to—” Richie starts, and like that Eddie loosens his grip on his cock, and he eases his fingers out of him, chuckling when Richie whines a little.

“Wouldn’t want that,” Eddie mumbles, lips still against his neck, the sound of his voice radiating down Richie’s spine.

Richie shudders from the loss of contact, feeling empty, almost cold, although the hot water holds strong. Eddie turns him back around to face him, and with his glasses off, he’s all he can see. Skin flushed, freckles dotting across his nose, a wicked little smile on his lips, soft brown irises eclipsed by his pupils. He holds Richie, hands around his arms, as his knees wobble and shake, as he laughs breathlessly.

“Not in here. Office life has killed my back,” he says, scowling a little, but leaning up to press a kiss to the corner of Richie’s lips.

“Okay, grandpa,” Richie says eventually, when his brain untangles and feeling returns to his legs.

“Shut the fuck up! I heard your knees pop earlier. What’s your excuse? Stand on too many stages?”

Richie shrugs. “Suck a lot of cock.”

Eddie presses his lips closed but shakes his head, amused. He doesn’t waste time now, nothing leisurely about it, cleaning the suds from their bodies, bubbles swirling into the drain. He manhandles Richie under the spray and his hands chase the water flowing down over his skin. Just when it starts to feel almost industrial, mechanical, he leans up to pull Richie down into a kiss. Here, their bodies, suspended under the spray of the shower, fingers twisting, intertwining, Richie imagines them kissing everywhere—in Eddie’s car on the drive back to Vegas, on the grey-blue couch, against the kitchen counter, the front door again, on the LA boardwalk with sand in their shoes and hair curled by saltwater, in the rain somewhere colder, farther north, the umbrella dropped to their sides so they can hold each other with both hands.

Eddie shuts off the shower and leads them both out, tossing a towel to Richie and patting himself dry in efficient, sweeping motions, fluffing the towel through his hair. When Richie watches him instead of drying off, Eddie hangs his towel back up and snatches Richie’s from where it lays on outstretched hands, _tsk_ ing at him. He has to stand on his toes to reach Richie’s hair, but his grip on Richie’s head is firm, the towel soft and plush, pulling water from his damp curls.

Eddie barely gets them dry, just sopping the droplets from their bodies, letting the moisture settle into their skin, a little cold as the AC pumps icy air into the rooms fighting the natural heat. He hangs the second towel and straightens them both neatly, before turning back to Richie with an expectant look.

“Playlist?” Eddie says, hand outstretched, fingers wiggling impatiently.

“Really?”

“You made it for us, didn’t you?” Eddie snaps, almost embarrassed. Richie shakes his head.

“You’re amazing,” he breathes out, heavy in the humid bathroom, all wild and stifling sincerity he would be too scared to voice normally, but the way Eddie’s eyes settle on him like he never wants to look away makes Richie feel, as he has all night, flush with bravery.

He fishes his phone from his jeans on the bathroom sink and drops it into Eddie’s hands, steam fogging the screen. Moments later sound pours through a speaker tucked somewhere in the bedroom, possibly behind the TV. It picks up where they left off in the car, slipping into the hazier, dreamier songs. It’s not as good as the car stereo, but it comes close. Eddie wraps a hand around his wrist and pulls him into the bedroom.

He missed the chance to look on the way in, Eddie’s grip urgent, the thought of a shower sounding _wonderful_ even before Eddie fucked him within an inch of his life with just his fingers, just his mouth against his neck. They come together in stops and starts that aren’t unnatural, that feel like the two of them finding their way with each other, learning their bodies, remembering them, perhaps.

The room is large, clean, neutral colour palette like the living room, all sophisticated greys and beiges, plucked straight from a catalogue, a room that’s more of an afterthought, a necessity, when Eddie spends his time moving between Phoenix and Vegas. The room has a few warm touches—more photos too far away for Richie to make out, some books stacked on the nightstand—but most notably is the deep ruby comforter stretched across the bed.

“You’re a little guy to have a king bed all to yourself,” Richie teases as they near it, imagining Eddie spread out in the middle, skin still flush from the shower, writhing on that red blanket.

“How else was I supposed to fit you on here?” Eddie asks, planting a hand on Richie’s chest and pushing him down onto the bed. Richie lands, bouncing a little, and shuffles back. Eddie frowns, eyes darting to the nightstand. “Fuck, one sec.”

“You’ve been planning this! Did you tamper with my starter? Was this all a ploy to get me here?” Richie asks, talking too much, voice following Eddie as he takes short, quick strides back to the bathroom.

“Oh yes, my great and devious plan to seduce a comedian I never heard of. Just another Thursday night in my life,” Eddie shouts from the bathroom, always too loud, filling the room.

Richie shuffles up the bed, the red blanket smooth, expensive, smelling of lavender. When he presses his cheek into the pillow, breathing deeply, they too smell of lavender and _Eddie_. His eyes fall closed, focussed on the sensation of the fabric under his skin, still damp from the shower. He slides a hand down his torso and palms himself.

He can hear Eddie in the bathroom over the music, mumbling to himself about water stains on the floor, and then the sound of his feet hitting carpet. He stills when he enters the room and Richie can almost feel his eyes on him. Emboldened, he wraps his hand around his cock, shower-damp and still hard between his legs. He fists himself slowly, long strokes, letting out keening groans. He throws his head back, firm pillow yielding under him. He focuses on the head of his cock, thumbing over his slit, stealing the beads of moisture beading there to ease his grasp.

He doesn’t stop when he hears Eddie cross the room, just losing himself for a moment in the slide of his hand, the twist of his wrist, the knowledge of Eddie watching him. He spreads his legs, knees rising a little, keeping his strokes long and lazy. He has spent many nights in hotels quietly jerking off alone, a means to an end. Under Eddie’s eyes his skin is hot to the touch, rubbing his free hand over his stomach, down to his thighs. He can hear himself, involuntary moans falling from his lips, breathy and gasping.

Then the bed dips next to him. He keeps his eyes shut as Eddie crawls, slowly, not letting their skin touch, between his legs. He can hear Eddie breathing—quiet but harsh sounds. He doesn’t touch Richie yet, just settling between his legs, and Richie spreads wider on the bed.

“Jesus, Rich, you’re fucking gorgeous,” Eddie says finally, his voice thick, gravelly.

Richie opens his eyes slowly, the room barely illuminated with the light from the bathroom, blurry without his glasses. Eddie kneels between his legs, his cock thick, dark, hard between them. He realizes faintly he hasn’t touched him yet, has only felt Eddie hard against his leg.

Before he can sit up, Eddie crawls over him, body between his thighs, leaning up to his mouth. He pulls him into another kiss, deep from the start, slow and hungry, licking into Richie’s mouth, one hand on his chin to pull his mouth open wider, to give Eddie control. Richie’s hand stills on his cock, moaning into Eddie’s mouth, before he switches targets. His hands roam up Eddie’s bare thighs, his soft, damp skin. He finally curls his fingers around Eddie’s cock and Eddie swears against his tongue, bucking down into his hand.

His touch is unhurried, almost lazy, as their mouths sink together. Eddie moans now, truncated, rough sounds, keeping their mouths together but shuddering down against Richie. He’s so fucking hard, precome pooling at his tip, slick as Richie works his hand in long, rhythmic strokes.

Eddie pulls away and Richie doesn’t follow this time, eyes fluttering open just to watch. Eddie’s cheeks are rosy, even in the low light. He can’t quite see the freckles but he knows where they are, thinks he could map them. He raises a hand to Eddie’s face, thumb stroking over his cheek, to do just that, Eddie turning his face into the touch, still gasping under Richie’s hand.

“You gonna fuck me or just call me beautiful?” Richie murmurs, teasing. Eddie smiles, but wraps a hand around Richie’s wrist to still his movements.

“I’m an excellent multitasker,” Eddie replies, leaning back on his haunches and patting around on the bed next to him. Richie can’t see what he’s patting around for on the bed, but he hears the tear of foil and the _snick_ of a lid.

“Oh yeah, I bet it says that on all your performance reviews.”

“I’ll give you a performance review,” Eddie mutters, pooling lube in his hand and slipping it between his fingers.

“Ooh, yes, Mr. Kaspbrak, tell me all about my goals and areas of improvement. Have I been focussed enough on the core values of our organization?” Richie says, dropping his voice to something sultry, watching Eddie slick himself up, cock glistening.

Then Eddie’s leaning over him, pushing his slick fingers back into Richie, still wet and open from the shower. “You’re an innovative part of our team, very creative,” Eddie says, pumping his fingers into him, Richie groaning at the touch, needy. “But you have a habit of distracting your coworkers.”

“God, this is just like when I worked at Dennys,” Richie says, and Eddie’s fingers stutter inside him, head dropping down to Richie’s chest, laughing with his whole body again.

“I really hope it’s not _exactly_ like that,” Eddie says, mumbled against his chest, fingers still inside him, working slowly.

“No, I mean, you’re not wearing an apron,” he says, and Eddie laughs again, lips still pressed into his chest. Richie has never laughed so much during sex. It’s _sex_ , so of course it’s fun, but he never knew it could be this fun.

Eddie gives him another kiss, wet and rough, biting his lips, before he sits back up. This mouth is still open, teeth showing, lips twisted up, eyes wide. He carefully slides his fingers out of Richie and shuffles closer between his legs, hands slipping down Richie’s thighs. He hooks his hands under his knees and gives Richie a firm pull, sliding him further down the bed, pulling his legs apart.

“Fuck,” Richie groans, cock throbbing against his stomach, encouraged by Eddie’s tight grip. “Oh man, I do not want to talk about Denny’s anymore.”

Eddie, chuckling, leans forward, hands still gripping Richie’s thighs, until the head of his cock brushes his hole, teasing. “What do you want to talk about instead?”

Richie loses all capacity to joke when Eddie’s cock nudges against him, slipping in a little before retreating, sliding wet and slick against his perineum.

“Ah—nothing, zilch, nada, please just _fuck_ me,” he babbles, twisting in the sheets to try to push himself down onto Eddie.

Another huff of laughter from above him and Eddie hands tighten on his thighs. Then he leans close, pressing past his loose rim, Richie squirming under his grip. He eases in, centimeters at a time, thick cock splitting Richie open. His toes curl in the sheets and he squirms.

“Jesus, you’re fucking tight,” Eddie says, voice wrecked. Richie tries to remember the last time he was fucked, months now, a dry streak. The slow slide, the burn, the ache between his legs makes him delirious. He needs more of it, squirming again to try to take him deeper.

“Name’s Richie,” he says, almost slurring as Eddie bottoms out. “Fuck, Eds.”

“That’s the idea,” he says between gritted teeth, buried in Richie, a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

Eddie’s cock feels incredible, thick and almost pulsating inside him, hot and wet and deep, deeper than his long fingers, thick enough that the stretch burns a little. Richie wants more, and a gasping _please_ falls between his lips. It’s all the prompting he needs to move, hips working in slow, grinding movements, pulling out and fucking him deeper each time. He keeps Richie’s legs spread, hard grip on his thighs, pulling him apart, as he speeds up, strokes getting rhythmic, bodies colliding with damp slaps as their shower-humid skin comes together. 

Richie’s eyes fall shut, back arching, “Fuck, fuck, Eds, please.”

He doesn’t speed up, keeping his pace the same, but he lifts Richie’s a little higher, manhandling him onto his cock. Richie doesn’t know what to do with his hands, one fisted in the satiny blanket below him, one landing on top of Eddie’s where he grips him.

“You feel amazing, sweetheart,” Eddie says, voice hoarse but tender. When Richie opens his eyes again Eddie is staring down, gaze hot, mouth open as he fucks him.

Richie’s grasp on language slips and he finds himself just moaning in response, a high-pitched, desperate sound that makes Eddie’s eyes darken, a smile twisting his lips. He finally speeds up, hips pistoning into Richie, lifting him a little off the bed until—

“Fuck, there, please,” Richie asks, pleading more than he thinks he ever has, and Eddie gives it to him, adjusting his grip, keeping Richie suspended, tailbone off the bed, and pounds into him, hitting the same spot with hawklike precision now that he knows, now that he can feel him.

Richie can’t remember any words except _fuck, yes, please, Eddie, Eddie, Eds_ , and he doubts he needs any others, not when Eddie is leaning over him and gasping, expletives and endearments falling from his lips, _you’re so good, baby, fucking look at you_ , every word unravelling Richie’s grip on reality a little further. All he can feel is the blissful slide of pleasure through his body, the places their skin touches, the bruising grip on his thighs where he can poke at the marks Eddie leaves and remember how it felt.

Eddie lets go of his right thigh and he slips a little downwards. He doesn’t stop, still pounding into him at the same, hard, steady pace, but he reaches to wrap his hand around Richie’s cock.

“You’re so fucking wet,” Eddie breathes.

Richie just comes undone, reduced to sounds and gasps, as Eddie’s long, _perfect_ fingers wrap around him, sliding, wiping the precome from the head of his cock before sliding down to the base, working in measured strokes, timed with his hips, and Richie thinks, in a moment of clarity or absurdity, or something in between, that Eddie was made to fuck him.

“ _I'm_ —” he gasps out, not finishing the sentence, before he comes, head falling hard back against the pillows, hands tensing and squeezing, the sheets and Eddie’s hand. There are stars dancing on his closed eyelids and Eddie strokes him through it, hand slick now with come and lube.

Eddie pulls out, too quickly, Richie clenching around air as Eddie coaxes the last of his orgasm from him. He lets go of Richie just before it’s too much, too sensitive, and when Richie figures out how to open his eyes Eddie is kneeling, all the way up, and touching himself, hands still slick with Richie’s come.

He’s flushed, gorgeous like this, all muscles tensed, his face screwed in concentration, eyes wild. Before Richie can reach up to help, arms heavy, tired, but desperate to touch him, Eddie bucks his hips and comes in long, white stripes across his stomach, his chest, a little hitting the bottom of his chin. Richie still squeezes his hand over Eddie’s as he finishes, and Eddie exhales his name like a fucking prayer.

Eddie flops down on the bed next to him, chest rising and falling rapidly, still gasping for air through his mouth, panting, laughing a little even as he lays there. Richie laughs too, a sound that bubbles past his lips before he can stop it, before he can think of why, but the sound eggs Eddie on and they dazedly laugh, music still playing in the background.

Eddie reaches into his nightstand, not looking over, and pulls out a plush, neatly folded towel. He cleans himself off first, and then Richie, hands gentle but quick, still laughing when he has to wipe the come, now dripping and sliding off his body, from Richie’s neck.

He places the towel gingerly back on the nightstand, next to the stack of books, and rolls back over. Their eyes meet and Richie wraps an arm around him to pull him into a long, slow, tender kiss. It stretches on for hours, or at least for two songs, until Eddie pulls away and drops his head to Richie’s shoulder.

“Do you have another cigarette?” is the first thing he says, and Richie wants to kiss him again.

“Bad habit,” Richie teases, curling his arm around Eddie to pull him onto his chest. Eddie shuffles closer and wiggles until his cheek rests on Richie’s shoulder, hair tickling the side of Richie’s face.

“Only if you make a habit out of it,” Eddie parrots. His hand rests on Richie’s chest, just over his diaphragm, rising and falling with him.

“Fresh out. Joint?” Richie asks, mostly joking, pressing his face firmer against the pillow.

Eddie sits up, all the post-orgasm softness gone from his eyes. “You had weed in my car when we drove over _state lines_?”

“I’ve had weed in my car since 2009.”

Eddie sputters, hands raising in discordant, choppy gestures. “What if we were pulled _over_?”

“Pretty sure they would be too focussed on revoking your driver’s license for going 20 miles over the speed limit to worry about a little baggie of the good stuff.”

“We could have gotten arrested. Arrested, Rich. In the desert!”

“I would have swallowed the baggie!”

“Oh, wonderful, that’s _so_ reassuring,” Eddie snaps, corner of his lips curling even as he bites down hard on the inside of his cheek.

He climbs out of bed so fast Richie thinks he’s actually angry, but the feeling fades as he watches him cross the room, ducking into the ensuite for a second, and returning with a black blob in one hand, and a skinnier black blob in the other. He raises one blob to his face and pulls the other blob over his head. When he steps closer, walking back to the bed, he becomes clearer, sharper to Richie. He’s wearing Richie’s shirt, the new one. It falls midway down his thighs, billowing around him. He looks up and meets Richie’s eyes again, blinking blearily behind Richie’s glasses. Richie leans up to kiss him.

Eddie gives him a little peck, but says, “Not in here. We can smoke in the yard.”

“Seriously?”

“What, do you not actually have any? Because then what the fuck was the point making me stress about—” Eddie says, verging on another rant. Richie raises his hands up, palms facing towards Eddie.

“You’re just a little uptight, I was surprised,” Richie says, laughing when Eddie glowers, an owlish look behind Richie’s glasses.

“I’m not a _little_ uptight, I am _clinically_ uptight and sometimes I need a fucking hit, but only when I’m _in Nevada_. So get fucking dressed and come outside, Richard,” Eddie nearly shrieks, a flush crawling up his neck, hair still wild and damp from the shower, his own hands balled into fists at his sides.

And it should surprise him, he thinks it should, that neat and tidy Eddie Kaspbrak wants to smoke some of his illicit weed in his backyard on a sickly hot Thursday night (Friday morning, now). Instead, it feels like another piece of a puzzle falling into place. Like a book he read during childhood, something half-remembered, something he knows he once loved even if the details escape him. Each piece of the story that is revealed makes the memory sharper, clearer. He wants to reread this book until the pages are creased and worn, coffee stains sinking into the cover, the spine cracked, falling apart. He wants to take it in to get it restored when it’s at the end of its life so he can read it again. He wants to read it like this, Eddie crossing the room, wrapping a hand around his wrist, and tugging him along.

* * *

Eddie’s backyard is neat, grass well-trimmed and yellowed by the summer sun. A hearty tree with thick, sprawling roots grows in the corner, along the fence, branches too high for a kid to climb but Richie thinks he could reach, could pull himself into the tree. The deck is clean, toys and sports equipment piled neatly in the corner. They sit in sturdy, wrought-iron chairs, pulled close enough that Eddie can hook their legs together.

Richie opens the thick ziploc bag, dipping his fingers in until they meet sticky flower, sage green and speckled with flecks of orange, the colour of fresh clementines. He presses some into the jaws of his metal grinder, crushing the bud between its teeth, filling the chamber. Eddie watches him the whole time, leaning lazily in his chair, none of the pin-straight posture from earlier. Richie’s shirt rides high on his thighs, a moonlight hitting his pale inner thigh, hints of coarse curly hair.

He watches still, eyes hooded, sipping from a water bottle he snagged on the way out, tongue chasing the droplets. Richie tears his eyes away, fumbling with the rolling papers, laying one flat on the table and shaking some of the fluffy grind onto it, placing the cardboard filter. Richie fumbles, sloppily rolling it like he has for years, like Patty taught him in eleventh grade in the back of their math class.

“If you’re going to do it like a fucking amateur then give it here,” Eddie says, not waiting before he snatches the half-rolled joint from his hands.

Richie stares, unable to look away, as Eddie unrolls his work so far. He uses his pinky to tuck the filter right to the end, to pile the grind into a neater mound. He curls the paper with two fingers and rolls, keeping the filter in place with his pinky, faster than Richie has seen _anyone_ roll a fucking joint. Then he leans down, locking eyes with Richie, as he drags his tongue along the seam, a little too wet, maybe on purpose. He presses the paper down, all the way along the edge, then flourishes it between two fingers.

Richie thinks he must have been wrong earlier, when he joked about love at first sight. If not wrong, then at least miscalculated. Whatever Richie felt when he saw Eddie for the first time, when his brain managed thoughts that went beyond _beautiful_ and _arms_ , it only swells, blossoms, with an aching continuity each moment, each laugh, each strange and new thing he learns about Eddie.

Eddie leans back in the chair again, sliding lower, letting Richie’s shirt sneak further up his thighs, until Richie can’t help but pull his chair close enough that he can rest his hand there, in the gap illuminated by the night, fingers teasing under the hem of the shirt. Eddie presses the joint between his lips as they curl into a lazy smile.

Richie raises his lighter to the end, holding the flickering flame as Eddie leans in, sucking in quick breaths until the embers burn strong and the light, almost silvery smoke pours from the end. When Eddie takes a long drag, his eyes close, like earlier, as the smoke hits his lungs, and he exhales long and slow, blowing citrusy smoke right in Richie’s face, making Richie cough mostly from surprise. He laughs and laughs, before taking another pull.

The night sky is clear, cloudless as the day time, and stretching as far as Richie can see. He’s in the suburbs, he thinks, because the tallest buildings in sight barely scrape the horizon, and a midnight blue blanket stretches over the world. The air is still thick, hot, but without the burning sun it’s almost bearable. Eddie passes him the joint and joins him in staring at the sky.

“Your neighbours gonna tattle on you?” Richie asks, teasing.

Eddie shakes his and raises one of his legs, pointing with his toes to the house on their right. The shirt rides further up his thighs and Richie thinks he needs a lifetime to absorb this image of Eddie.

“No one except me will catsit for her feral little fucker,” he says, then points again, still with his foot, at the other house. “And he’s a single dad. His daughter, Angie, is friends with Gabby. He works a lot on weekends to free up his weekdays, so she spends a lot of time over here.”

“Watch out or I’m going to have to tell Kyle you’re the biggest softie in the world,” Richie says, teasing, but his chest is tight again and he thinks maybe there’s a world in which he can help coddle the feral cat or help Gabs and Angie with their homework. Maybe it’s this world.

Eddie groans. “He already knows, it’s terrible.”

An easy, blissful haze settles over him as they pass the burning joint between them, fingers brushing with each exchange, having conversations between themselves. The music from the house pours out even through the closed door, just quiet echoes from the tail end of the B-side, a sultry piano tune leading the way.

“You’re picking up Gabs in the morning?” Richie asks. Eddie nods. Richie hesitates for a heartbeat, before asking, “Should I stay?”

Eddie, eyes still fixed on the night sky, quirks his lips. “I would like that.”

“Until?”

“Until.”

If the feeling spreading through his chest had a colour, Richie thinks it would be the warm, tanned beige of the Arizona sun stretching over Eddie’s skin, speckled with his freckles, streaked with sunscreen.

“Will Gabs be okay with that?” he asks, and Eddie rolls his eyes at the nickname.

“She loves meeting new people. Loves it. Whenever I take her into the office, she wanders around chatting up a storm, asking peoples’ names and then just calling them _friend_.”

“She sounds amazing,” Richie says, earnest.

“She is.” Eddie’s voice wavers, thick with emotion. He clears his throat.

“I have to go back to LA,” Richie says eventually, with all the casual tone of someone who says they need canned beans from the store, when there are dried beans in their pantry. Something eventual, but distant.

“Of course,” Eddie says, pulling his eyes away from the sky this time. His pupils are wide, eyes red, lids heavy when he looks back at Richie.

“But I have some time.”

“How much time?” Eddie is all open questions, never asking for a specific answer, never disguising his intention, just waiting for him. His emotions ride just below the surface of his words. Richie wonders how refreshing it must be to live with such honesty all the time. How frightening it must be.

“How much time do you want?” Richie asks, not quite brave enough to say what he feels, but hoping Eddie can fill in the gaps.

Eddie shakes his head, laughing quietly. “Don’t ask questions you know the answer to.”

For a moment he considers pursuing it, pushing for the reassurance he craves. Then Eddie stands from his chair just long enough to settle into Richie’s lap, tailbone pressed firmly against Richie’s stomach, thighs along thighs, leaning all the way back against his chest. Richie’s arms curl around his waist on instinct to pull him closer, tucking his nose into Eddie’s neck. He smells like the faint citrus of his body wash and like Richie’s shirt—sweat, sunscreen, smoke. He presses a kiss just below Eddie’s ear and gets a soft, pleased sound in return. Eddie steals the joint back from him and starts singing along to the last song on the playlist as its drum-forward rhythm emanates from the house, voice low and husky, smoke curling from his lips, singing half the lyrics wrong, but getting the important ones. As he mumbles the final words of the song, their bodies drenched in dim light from the street lamps, air hazy from the smoke, Richie knows the answer.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading this icky gooey summer loving that's more self-indulgent than it should be. Come say hi @beverlymarshian or check out my SMAU @derrythrift on twitter!
> 
> They're listening to Last Podcast on the Left at the beginning, Episode 379: Mormonism Part II, and Richie's cute little shirt from Ali is [this one](https://ragstock.com/shop/palms-hibiscus-woven-button-up-shirt/).
> 
> Check out this [AMAZING fan art](https://twitter.com/thebrightmess/status/1271862602419916800?s=20) by @thebrightmess. I cried.
> 
> If you want to read a shitty, unedited notes app fix it about their eventual proposal you can find it here.


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